When I see this awesome picture of Britney Spears having another meltdown, all I can think is...
OH. MY GOD. The shoes!! Where did she get the shoes!?!?
Bonnie & Clyde
A few weeks ago, my friend Steven and I were driving around downtown Chicago looking for a place to buy pants. More specifically, we had five hours to kill so pants buying became our agenda, and that meant we had to 1) find a place to buy these pants and 2) park the car within 2 miles of said place while 3) paying less than $28 an hour for the luxury of doing so. Obviously, we were on a mission.
In a freak turn of events we found just what we were looking for in the same place: a store for buying pants down the block from a parking garage attached to a sports bar. Better yet, we learned that if we had our parking ticket validated at the sports bar we would only have to pay $7 an hour for the privilege, and we even got to keep our first born children! This was way better than the time we went to Navy Pier in the middle of winter to find everything closed and out of service and then had to fork over $43, 12 pints of blood and donate all our body hair to Locks of Love just to park there. So $7 and a beer at a sports bar seemed like a steal.
But if you didn't know, Dave & Buster's isn't a sports bar. It is in fact something entirely different, something that can't even rest itself near the spectrum of being a sports bar. It's actually a casual dining experience tucked inside a 2-story arcade, packed to the gills with mozzarella sticks and flashing, whirling video games and the occasional skee ball thrown haphazardly across the room by a child whose hands were too greased up by his sampler platter to get a good grip. We ascended the stairs into neon signed oblivion, and all Steven could say was, "I am absolutely beside myself."
Dave & Buster are apparently the meth head cousins of Chuck E. Cheese, and they've made a corner of downtown Chicago their own private crack house.
We fought out way through the crowd to find someone, anyone, who could help us. Imagine the drone of penny slots combined with the continuous knocking of a bowling alley and the high pitched squealing of 500 children with single-digit ages and you'll know what it was like, and while normally we wouldn't put ourselves in that kind of environment voluntarily, we had to accomplish getting our parking validated before we were free to leave. As we waited, I spied something that would bring us to our doom. There, only ten feet away from me perched on the edge of a mahogany bar was a touch-screen video game console hosting the only thing that could get me to hang out in an arcade in the middle of the day: A MegaTouch Force 2006 with Castle Bandits.
I told Steven immediately, "Oh my GOD. We have to play, this is the greatest game ever!" Steven was incredulous until I explained to him that this game was ridiculously amazing and addictive, and that I would routinely go to bars in the middle of the day just to play it and sometimes never even had a drink! The fact that I could be in a bar and be so distracted by a video game that I could not have a drink drew Steven into submission, so we ordered a Dave & Buster's Player's Club card full of $10 in $.25 increments and sat down to play for a bit.
Three hours or so later, we'd been sitting there high-fiving each other to sheer victory over Castle Bandits and hadn't even realized that we'd racked up over $50 in Dave & Buster's Player's Club credits. But it was worse - I'd turned Steven into a Castle Bandits addict. While I was in the bathroom he was secretly playing games without me. When people would come up to the bar to order drinks, Steven would reach over and steal the Player's Club cards they'd set down and replace it with his empty one. When I found out that Steven was trying to bribe small children to trade their Player's Club cards for his bowl of pretzels, we obviously had to leave.
We left the place shaking with stimuli like it was 1978 and we'd just been freebasing in a dumpster behind Studio 54. If you've never played this game, you don't know what it's like, waking in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, wondering where the closest MegaTouch Force 2006 is in proximity to your bedroom, how many quarters you've got at the bottom of your purse, if the neighbors would look at you funny if they saw you scavenging under the seats of your car for more. It's the most ridiculously out-of-control feeling when just one fix leaves you entirely feigning for more, and you can't shake the craving out of your head for weeks. All. You. Think. Is Castle. Bandits.
It's been a month since then and I'm still getting text messages from Steven in the middle of the night that proclaim, "I"m in a bar and this place doesn't have Castle Bandits and I'm about to GO OFF ON SOMEONE!!!!"
Bloody Kansas
On my flight back to Chicago I was blessed with the indisputable gospel that is a window seat on a Southwest airlines flight with an "A" boarding pass. There is so much more to say about this flight, that I got to the airport at 6:30 am for an 8:10 am flight and the security line was backed up about twenty billion feet thanks to a troupe of traveling basketball teams in hideous matching uniforms, but I won't go into how the rest of us non-matching travelers got to bypass the entire security screening just because it was obvious someone hadn't had their coffee and did not want TO DEAL. That was a great part about my flight, but the best part was a tie between the snack pack I got only 20 minutes into the direct leg, or the guy I got to sit next to the whole time.
As we made our way across the west and then the mid-west, the skies cleared and we were able to look down to the flat prairies all laid out like a thick pioneer quilt stretching to the horizon. With each state line, our pilot would say, "If you look to your left, you'll see Nevada! Utah! Wyoming! Colorado!" It was amazing to all of us that he not only could tell which state was which from this high up, but also that he assumed anyone cared.
"And if you look to your left now, you'll see Blloooooodddy Kansas!" The American history whore inside me started polishing her fuck me shoes the minute he said that gem, and I huddled myself over my 8" plastic window to look down on page 347 of Our American Heritage.
“They say it’s called Bloody Kansas because there was some slave revolt there,” the man sitting next to me declared. “But how many slaves have you heard of from Kansas?”
He adjusted his adjustable baseball cap and obviously had no idea who he was talking to. Instead I just said, "OH?" inviting more of his practical clairvoyance of days past.
“Yeah,” he replied, doing the math in his head with one eye closed in concentration, “I think there was about 4,000 or maybe 5, 000 slaves. I don’t know how many were freed and how many died of starvation or something. Probably about half.”
Not only am I pretty sure there were perhaps 650 THOUSAND slaves imported into American homes against their will, I'm also pretty sure those half-million plus people procreated a few times over the course of 200 years. And I'm pretty sure the reason it's called Bloody Kansas is because the Border Ruffians staged a revolt against the Free-Staters for four years, which lead to that little thing called the Civil War, but how fun would it be to remind him of this?
My mind absolutely grimaced at this confession of his, this image of his stupid adjustable baseball cap whizzed through my optic tract to turn the gears in my front lobes with maddening speed, and I said to him quite coolly, as if I really meant it, "Oh right. I really don't know much about that at all."
In my own commercials for the Las Vegas tourism bureau, the ones I star in by myself in my own frame of reference, this is the kind of scenario I mythically insert myself into. Instead of giving out a fake name or persona, I say things like, "I really don't know anything about the Civil War," and "Which president was Lincoln? 35 or 42?" It's ridiculously fun to me and I have no idea why. Perhaps when buffalo jerky salesmen travel they sneak into truck stops and rummage through the buffalo jerky display to ask the sales girl, "Which do you think is the best?" And when she says she likes the Peppered Teriyaki version because it's really good with cheese, he'll chuckle to himself while agreeing that yes, he bets it's probably really good with cheese.
It's the same for me whenever a stranger starts talking about anything that happened in what was the continental US between 1805 and 1895 because it's my own private Idaho, or in this case, my own private Bloody Kansas. So when I say to a stranger in an adjustable ball cap that I don't know much about the Civil War, I get this tingle in my soul that shudders throughout my entire body as he starts to list off every inaccuracy his Midwestern public school education tortured him with, from the fact that Washington was pro-slavery because "he had a ton of them" to how Ben Franklin used his slaves to discover electricity, and it's not like that's all that bad. I just nod and nod and listen intently, my eyes lighting up with an evil enjoyment he probably thinks is interest as he keeps going until eventually explaining to me that when the Civil War ended, people didn't even know because the telephone wasn't invented until 1920.
My enjoyment of this is evil indeed, because while I may not know every combination of buffalo jerky out there, I certainly know you shouldn't pair it with cheese.
Add to Group.
This Monday morning is a sad one for your group email list of female friends. Amy broke up with Todd on Saturday, after Jim and Nancy's pre-holiday party. After all the fun they had together that night playing Balderdash and watching the Five For Fighting concert DVD, Amy told Todd she just couldn't see a future with him, she said it just like that in the passenger seat of his Camry. Amy wanted everyone to know because it's still really hard for her to talk about, so that's why she's sending a mass email out, just so she can get it out in the open and just not think of it the rest of the day. You notice she sent the email to herself and BCC'ed the group, perhaps because she didn't want Kristin seeing that Noelle is still on the list, even after what happened between them last month at Bunco.
Amy's letter is no way to start the day, so you think that it'd be good to suggest happy hour after work at the Chilli's across the freeway. You know at least half of the women on the mass email list won't want to drive all the way across the freeway after work, even if Amy and Todd were together for three and a half years, it's not like they were at all close to being married or anything. Plus it's a Monday, and you know Kari has yoga. You send a private message to Lisa asking if she thinks people would be up for a group thing; Lisa writes you back and copies her roommate Chelsea who's not on the group email list but knows Amy through Todd's college roommate, Chelsea's cousin. Lisa thinks you guys should plan something.
You open Amy's message and hit Reply All and you compose a short but affectionate email to her on behalf of everyone, you hate being the ice breaker but you know everyone always expects you to be. (You'll complain about this later at dinner to Emily who'll tell you she didn't even know what had happened until 10:30 after her morning sale's meeting, if you'd waited she would have written the first email.) It's slow and awkward but Amy writes back and says, "Yeah, Chilli's would be really nice."
No one in your group is very good at acting normal when bad things happen. When Lisa got divorced you'd think she'd died, she only really got back into the group she she hosted that candle party at her house. You wonder what it'll feel like for Amy, what's she's thinking now, if she's afraid of losing the group all together. Then one person on the mass email list who usually never replies will buck up to the plate and shock everyone. Melissa will write a very revealing and emotional response, something with "I know what you're going through" written between the italicized, rose-colored lines, and to make it all very meaningful and supportive she'll press Reply All and send the story of her own heartbreak to everyone on the mailing list, just to encourage Amy but really, to encourage everyone.
Then Emily will do the same, feeling compelled by the sudden honesty of her friends, and she'll click Reply All and remind everyone how hard it was for her and Mike to split up, especially since they were still working together and they had *just* booked that cruise to Mexico. Then Ashley will, and then Lisa will. Then you will, and you'll end your story with, "See? We've all been there." You'll send a seperate message to Melissa thanking her for being so brave and bringing everyone together like that. She'll reply with an emoticon wink.
Amy will wait until after lunch to reply to everyone who sent her their personal tragedies with the hopes of lightening her own, and when she does reply it'll be a small and sweet, "Thanks you guys. See you tonight." She'll think all day about how lucky she is to have such good friends and such a convenient way of reaching them all at once.
Then later that night after a few too many salted margs, Melissa will laugh and say she never meant to hit Reply All in the first place, what a funny mistake it all turned out to be! Everyone just started confessing all this stuff and it wasn't even intentional!! She'll say when she got Emily's reply to what she thought was her private email to Amy, she was shocked and started thinking maybe Emily had hacked into her email account an sent something to everyone without her knowing, Emily's the only one she knows who could do something like that!
She'll laugh it off while Emily sits there a little shocked at the insinuation, then she'll say, "No! It's just because you're so conniving, ha ha ha, no I didn't mean it that way!" You and Lisa will look at each other, remembering what happened at Bunco last month, and you start composing an email in your head that you'll send out tomorrow morning to everyone on the list, beginning with, "So I guess we all need to talk..."
Correspondence Course
I've been very sick this week with some kind of roller coaster head cold that I've been alternately suffering from violently or not really noticing at all. The other night, completely doped up on sniffling sneezing so I can rest medicine, I woke up at about 2am composing a letter in my head to the Mt. Pleasant SPCA where I picked up my cat three years ago.
It was full of, "I don't know what compelled me to write you," and "I just want you to know what a great job you're doing at the SPCA." At one point that I assume was prompted by my inability to remember where I was going with my three-years-late thank you letter, four or five hypothetical pages into it, I started writing things down on the back of a Kleenex box with a sharpie pen I found in the drawer of my bedside table.
And I quote myself from the back of that Kleenex box thusly: "Cooper has grown into a very loving cat. He spends his morning watching the birds in my Elm tree from his favorite perch on the fence, and in the evening as the sun sets he likes to sit on my front steps and watch my neighbors playing basketball. I wanted you to know how happy he is." That last part I can only partially make out, since by that time my mind had started to fatigue and I finished the letter using only consonants and asteriks which I probably told myself I'd go back and fill in when I woke up.
Now, I'm not sure when NyQuil started inducing psychosomatic episodes like this, or if those green capsules are really filled with gin, that drink of the Devil's that usually makes me pour forth romantic platitudes about myself and ex lovers and write those down in the middle of the night, drenched with epiphany as I may be. The gin, I could understand it making me all weepy for Charleston like I've been many times in the past few years, all the wanting to go back and then the remembering of the unemployment. I'm sure it's caused more than a few middle of the night pen wieldings from under my covers, just like any heartbreak does for any young single woman with a cat.
But never, I hope, have I woken up with the conviction to thank the people who rescued my cat from the trash bin he was born in behind the Chick-Fil-A across from the KMart parking lot. If I had done so with a sober mind and without a head cold so severe I've wondered today if I was actually having a brain aneurysm, a letter to said SPCA might have gone something like this:
Dear SPCA,
So, when you chopped off my cat's balls when he was like 4 weeks old, is that what causes him to wake me up at 4 am every fucking morning so he can go out and play? Because let's talk about getting those back so I can sleep in.
An Open Letter To The 11 Men Who Sent Me Dove's Evolution Commercial
Dear The 11 Men Who So Sincerely Sent Me Dove's Evolution Commercial:
I have to admit, getting the same snippet of film eleven times over the past two weeks means I should probably start paying attention. I especially want to acknowlege that everyone who sent me that commercial was male, and while I don't want to feel like perhaps you're trying to tell me something, I can't help but think of my much mascara I put on this morning while viewing it. What you don't seem to realize, though, is how much I love my mascara.
My mascara is an enormous part of who I am, not just as a woman but as a person. I've been wearing mascara since I was 13 years old along with a lot of other makeup, and nothing about my identity as a woman relies on it or is nurtured by it whatsoever. It just so happens that my mascara - and all my makeup - is a great comfort to me when many things are not, and I don't really need you sending me video clips over the internet about how wrong this is. When I was traveling through China for the summer, one night my friends and I got stuck across the border from our hotel in Hong Kong, and while we wondered where we'd sleep that night and how we'd arrange a way back home in the morning, I was just happy to have my 2" travel size mascara in my pocket.
Eleven men sent me this YouTube clip with such dignity, such grace, as if to declare yourselves set apart from the men of this world who do nothing but demean women and create a disparaging self-image for us to clamor after. Like you were saying, "Look, Sarah: I understand your plight, I care about women too!" Even you, John Stewart, who I usually enjoy as you make that same face and tell me the same story every night. Even you, JF, who knows the very depths of my soul and yet still speaks to me everyday as if I'm not a complete lunatic inside. Even you, Steven Merchant, who I usually adore with all my being, yet you still send me MySpace bulletins that say "Watch this," as if I haven't seen it before.
I don't love my mascara because I'm trying to impress you, or because I'm trying to live up to some untouchable standard illustrated so thoughtfully in a time-lapse commerical put together by a company that survives off convincing poeple their skin is dry. I love it because it helps me display to the world the person I hope I am: bright eyed, confident, and full of approval of myself, my skin, and my body, regardless of what anyone thinks. And it reminds me more than anything that it isn't women who have a distorted view of beauty, since we often find ourselves with men who are uglier, huskier, shorter, taller, lankier, and less attractive than we'd ever see as our ideal. It's always men who find themselves falling short as they rummage around a party seeking out the prettiest woman to chat up, and then they kick back as many Jack and Cokes as possible to get someone like the real me to look attractive enough to take home.
What I love the most about this Dove commercial is that the model used is incredibly attractive to begin with, even before a sponge full of foundation and concealer is taken to her skin. She exudes confidence and self-esteem, more than a slathering of liquid makeup could cover up. But what's funny is that no man I've ever met, maybe no man in the history of the world with a modicum of cocky self esteem would be caught dead romancing a woman who looked like her without all that technology at any party. He would never bring her home to his parents in a wave of pride, nor would he introduce her to his friends without feeling the need to warn them first about a pretend bout with Cancer she's facing that's caused her face to be so puffy, and to tell them please don't bring it up.
He would instead take her aside on their third or fourth date and say, "Have you ever worn lipgloss? Because I think it's really hot." Then she'd go out and buy $40 worth of lipgloss, as your counterparts in the department stores shook their heads saying, "Tsk tsk, if only she could find a guy who liked her just how she is."
Frankly, I prefer the air-brushed and technologically manipulated version of that model, just like I prefer the air-brushed and technologically manipulated version of myself. And I know that model prefers that version of herself because that's the version that gets her laid, that's the version that gets her attention and work, that's the version that gives her - somehow - a semblance of self worth. And if our mascara and our concealer and our push up bras do that for us, if those little tweaks and snips and stitches here and there give us enough confidence to climb on top for once, I say that nothing is wrong with that.
Problem Solving
Wendy: "This bad thing happened, and then this horrible thing happened and I didn't realize it, and then this other thing happened that wasn't good which caused this other horrible thing, and this isn't going to go well because of this thing that also happened because of the first bad thing, and beyond that there was this other awkward incident I had to deal with and now since that awful thing happened this other bad thing has to happen, and then I have to do this with that because of it."
Me: Oh my. Go get one of those hot dogs with cheese in the middle.
This Just In.
It started out as a medium sized airplane, and the midday anchor made some brief comparisons to John F. Kennedy Jr's beleaguered plane falling fast into the Atlantic all those summers ago, but he realized such a story was too close to the American people to bring up, and he quickly changed his description to be more like "one of the planes used during forest fires." Good call from him, since the static image of flames pouring from a 20 story building is plastered across the tv as he speaks.
But then, as he's talking about forest fires and the mechanics he knows of those planes they use to put the fires out (his uncle had his pilot's license and often talked of those very planes), he gets word that the aircraft that flew into this Manhattan building wasn't an airplane, ladies and gentleman, there's word it was actually a helicopter, quite likely it was a Black Hawk helicopter like the ones used in military reconnaissance. He reminds the viewing audience of the movie Black Hawk Down, if they can imagine the size of the helicopters featured in that movie, they'll understand just what kind of damage has been done to this building.
In lower Manhattan, it is not uncommon to see helicopters like this, flying through what's called the "exclusion zone." It was a cloudy day but visibility wasn't a factor it seems, although a neighbor reported hearing a sound like some firecrackers right before the aircraft hit the building, and as the cameras zoom in to a shot of the one floor that is still burning, viewers are able to see potted plants aflame, dangling from red hot wires affixed to charred patio beams. Understandably, this kind of tragedy is unforeseeable for most people, even if they live in areas where helicopters fly often, and if they'd felt they were in any danger perhaps they would have brought their plants inside before the aircraft hit.
The White House has been contacted, again the White House has been contacted and they do not think that this is an act of terrorism.
Now there is word from a reporter on the scene that the name of this apartment building, this very large, multi-story building in Manhattan that is currently on fire due to a large or medium sized Black Hawk-like helicopter, that the apartment building is called the Bel Air building. It is a large building with hundreds of apartments, again it is the Bel Air building, if you are a resident of this building, you might want to call home.
This whole time the midday anchor is working on his commentary silently, nodding along in the side-by-side as the reporter walks the crowded street below this tragedy. The midday anchor is faking concern, waiting for the right moment to bring the focus back to the studio so loops of the crash and subsequent fire can start playing again, after all the fire has been put out and there's no sense keeping the cameras on boring black smoke. He has better things to talk about; were there casualties? Witnesses? Are there pieces of debris on the ground that the reporter can pick up and flaunt on camera?
Before any more can be said about the crash and Black Hawk Down and it's breakthrough star Josh Harnett, the midday anchor hears his producer urging him to cut in for an update, and he reminds the viewing audience that The Bold and the Beautiful will be re-aired later this evening. As the loop of the once-flaming building plays on the split screen, the anchor tells everyone to set their Tivos for 2 a.m., The Bold and the Beautiful will be aired in its entirety at 2 a.m.
The More You Know.
Today while walking to work, my shoe went flying off mid-step in the middle of the crosswalk, sending me to my knees and tossing my purse behind me about ten feet. As I scrambled to retrieve my shoe and the contents of my purse, cars started pouring through the intersection, trying to drive right through my cluttered crosswalk.
According to the man yelling to me from the window of his truck as he inched his way around me, this is something that "only retards do". I've made note of it for future reference.
S.W.A.K.
I just watched this show that was all about how envelopes are made. After I managed to calm the party down a bit and turn down the music and stop having so much wild fun, I learned this nice tid bit about the standard envelope thanks to the voice over narration: "Then the glue is applied and allowed to dry. The envelope now needs to be moistened to stick to itself."
So all the sudden it dawned on me, if an envelope only needs to be moistened to stick to itself, why have I been licking them all this time?? In fact, why is the world licking envelopes still if all we have to do is put a little water on them? It's not like water is in short supply, we have so much of it we put it in bottles and sell it, and it also does this thing where it comes out of our walls on demand.
Even if in the early 1910's or so water wasn't so safe to drink when it came out of your walls, using it to moisten an envelope doesn't mean you have to drink it. Back in 1910 women were practically voting, certainly they could have come up with a contraption like those plastic bottles with the sponge tops we use now. The envelope has absolutely no reason to come into proximity of our faces ever unless we're sniffing it for the perfume of a lost loved one. I have no idea who decided, Hey, forget all that water! I can make something similar with my mouth!
And let's say perhaps I was really hard up for water and all I had was some stuff that wasn't water but worked the same way and it happened to be in my mouth, that still doesn't justify me licking anything that isn't a lollipop. Worse comes to worst, I lick my own fingers and use them to seal an envelope, but I certain don't just wag my tongue over something by default.
Who does that?! Was there some campaign to promote envelope licking? Something that made the masses not want to waste tap water on correspondence? Were we convinced envelope glue would only react to human saliva? Were they rationing it during the war? Was religious envelope licking like New Coke for the Lost Generation?
It just kind of makes me wonder what else we're putting our tongues on that probably isn't necessary.
