November 2004 Archives
My other brother, the one who doesn't look like some bear-cub porno star, has finally gone and done what most of my family, including my dead mother, had hoped he would eventually do: he and his wife have had a baby. This is quite an event since he'd professed to not wanting children for just about forever. His wife whom we love, love, love has now proven, without a doubt, how smart she really is since she'd been saying from the beginning of the no-baby situation, "just wait and see". Sometimes the men in my family, and I include myself in this statement, just need to be told what we really want and need.
My mother had so wanted to see Mitch and Sarah with a baby, just as she so wanted to see Matt and Nicole's Hayden who was still unborn when she died that spring. It would be easy to get depressed over her missing this joyous event but I truly believe she knew that a baby was eminent for Mitch and that makes me feel not so inclined to be blue. It would also be easy to get caught into some quasi-religious, fuzzy, sentimental feeling that maybe she was reincarnated into the new baby but I don't have any belief or faith in that at all. It's easier for me to think of the joy of the new baby and leave it at that. I'm sure my mother knows what she knows which is to say, probably more than any of us here and I'm content with my faith in that.
So we're welcoming little Allison Amber into the family who have been so patient and excited for her blessed arrival, safe and sound.
Just heard that "Steel Magnolias" is coming to Broadway in the spring and Delta Burke is taking the role of Truvy. I mean, could we buy tickets yesterday?
Kris is the Web Goddess for many reasons, but this weekend she underscored her deity-ship by marrying the Snook (Well, hellllllloooooo, Mrs. Snook!) in Vegas, at The Little White Wedding Chapel, by the King of Rock-n-Roll, Elvis Presley, while simulcasting over the internet to all her worshippers. And she had on a beautiful dress and the what appeared to be the most comfortable pair of shoes ever so double snaps for being doubly hip. It was freakin' awesome. Don't fret if you missed it, you can see the feed for the next month.
Congratulations to the happy couple.
Fuck. What's the point of having an apartment in the city to cut out the commute and sleep in in the mornings if I'm going to wake at 2am anyway? At least I'm starting to decipher this strange G4 notebook I've inherited.
I love corporate mottos, but being who I am which is a pissy, see-I-told-you-so, kind of guy, I love when bad customer service completely invalidates well-intentioned, very expensive corporate mottos. Here's where I start to blog about all the shitty things in Manhattan so hold on to your hat.
You can do it. We can help...but, not in Manhattan. Call me crazy, but I know that I shouldn't have to go outside of the greater New York area to get a fucking piece of 2x4 cut down to 26 1/2 inches. However apparently I do since the quizzical looks I got from the HD information desk clerks, all turned out and snooty, told me what I should have suspected as soon as I asked for the piece of wood.
"We don't cut wood."
"Say what?"
"We don't cut wood here."
"Here as in Home Depot, You can do it, we can help?"
"We don't cut wood."
I have fucking seen the limit now. Home Depot and you can't get a piece of wood. I guess I might understand if I was asking for some kind of endangered Amazon jungle rainforest wood but I was asking for a run of the mill 2x4. Honestly, I'm going to have to actually leave Manhattan, the city that has everything, for a $0.55 piece of wood. Unbelievable.
We officially moved into the city last night. The last of the major stuff was organized (though we're still missing a couch) as were the cats. They still aren't speaking to us this morning and one has passive aggressively puked a hairball onto one of my shoes to underscore their mutual displeasure at being uprooted. Honestly, the majority of our conversations about the cons of this move have all centered around the inability of the cats to be able to adjust to four days in a larg-ish one bedroom in the city. And it's not like these were outdoor kitties up at the house. They were housebound but just had three floors to run around and play in AND we'll be back there for 1/2 of the week. I've completely hit my limit with them (and I'm typically a patient, animal-concerned kind of human) and I'm completely OVER coddling these cats and their delicate feline sensibilities. I'm totally going to be murdered in my sleep for admitting that out loud but it's true. No more discussions about how we're psychologically damaging the kitties with the move. I have three words for them at the next bad attitude demonstration: Burn. Pile. Kitties. Look it up.
And speaking of pussies, while I know it will sound like a cliché, there was some women in our building who spent the better part of the evening getting the hell banged out of her last night. I know this because her window was open and she was letting the city know. Loudly. It was comical the grunts and moans floating down to our place and when we'd go to the window to see if we could figure out who it was, you'd see the silhouettes of the other building tenants at their windows doing the same. That's something I'm going to have to remember: bite the pillow during dirty monkey sex if I don't want the neighbors to know our sha-zizzle.
It was everything to stay up until 11:30 last night, get up at 6am with a full nights sleep and be to work by 7am. I'm going to love it even more when I leave work at 4pm and walk in the apartment at 4:30. I might even take a nap just because I can.
I love movie and TV soundtracks. If I lollygagged through my music collection, a majority of what I own, besides Enya (it was a phase), Vangelis, and Pink Floyd are soundtracks. There is an inner drama-queen not buried too deep, I realize, and the dramatic swell and emotionally charged crescendos of soundtrack music, specially designed to heighten and exploit the moods of a particular scene, get me every time. Not only am I a marketer's dream, I'm an emotional sucker for overwhelming and awe-inspired thrusts of music. Of course my favorites include a lot of Vangelis (BladeRunner and 1492), but I listen to "Lord of the Rings", "Gladiator", and a constant favorite for a few months, "Solaris". Chances are, if you ran up to me on the street while I had my iPod running, one of these soundtracks would be playing.
Such is my need to share this right now because I'm listening to the "Gladiator" soundtrack again after some time apart and finding it as powerful and moving as the first time I heard it.
I would offer up to any who fain concern or anxiety over our return to the City and in particular, to the lofty nether-regions of East Harlem, that there is in fact a re-gentrafication of that part of the world: fewer crack houses and more stores, less crime and more police presence. Of course while there are 7 of the top 10 fast food chains within a one block radius of the new pad (and a Popeye's Chicken with within two), there isn't a Starbuck's to save one's mocha-chocha-latta-haha life. Rest assured Worried Urbanites and others, the Harlem Renaissance has a ways to go yet; Starbuck's will be your harbinger of Arrival. BUT...
Not only is there not a Starbuck's, there isn't any decent coffee shop, either. I'm not a coffee snob in any way and I prove this daily but re-heating the 7am pot of decaf in my office throughout the day, even going so far as to microwave the last cupful down to a thick, tarry syrup of grounds and the hydrochloric acid used in the decaffeination process. I'm saying I'll drink that coffee whether in a puddle on the floor or off a humpy, hairy man’s back. I do not stand on java ceremony. That being said, when I ask for DECAF, I'm not asking for SANKA. If I wanted reconstituted SANKA, I'd drink the first-flush water after Jeff's morning constitutional. But I don't, I want DECAF. So back to the point, Harlem from where we are down to what I expect is the most northern reach of Starbuck’s Manhattan empire at 96th street is SANKA CITY. Worse yet, on my jaunt back from the bank yesterday morning (had to tip the movers who couldn't get the couch through the building hallway back to our apartment and had to load it back on the truck to take it away), not only did I get SANKA, I got SUGAR with it when I specifically asked for no sugar and said so not once but again, a second time, when the counter guy asked if I wanted it. I'm doing OK with our boozed-up building super who pays the beer-bottle collecting collective a few bucks to help us with stuff around the apartment, but I'm not doing OK without an accessible, dependable DECAF-making coffee-shop.
Got my Weatherbug Freeze Warning for Sullivan County all day yesterday during work but honestly, anyone who lives up there would have long ago brought in and covered any plantings in danger from frost. But...
Freeze Warning my ASS. We walked out to the truck this morning with a God-damn half-inch of SNOW all over the ground. Not just a light dusting but an honest to God coating of it. Be warned, Winter comes.
When Jeff and I walked out of the Hershey Hotel last night at 2am after the wedding of one of his oldest friends, we were overcome with the wafting, heavy smell of chocolate. It hits you hard and makes your nose burn. I asked Jeff if the Hershey factory purposely pumps aromatic chocolate into the air as some kind of weird, addictive PR stunt. He said it was just the factory, no malicious intent intended. But it's like subliminal olfactory advertising and my God if I didn't want to just sit down and eat the fourteen Hershey bars I had in my pockets from the wedding. I did wake this morning with something brown smeared all over my fingers. Coulda been chocolate or coulda been poo so I opted just to wash it off and not ask questions. I hate those kind-of-dark, unsure post-wedding nights. One could easily have foretold the kind of night it was going to be because of all the pics on the digicam today, this was the best one. I mean...could my deer-caught-in-headlights look that is usually so adorable be any more ridiculous?
One of the bridesmaids (of which Jeff was one) kept asking me at the reception about the humor quotient of our relationship.
"Is he always funny?" she asked. Having several glasses of Woodbridge Shiraz at my disposal, my usually social-phobic stammering had mellowed to an adorable, affected wink and slur.
"Oh yes, he's always making me laugh," I replied with a wink and a click out of the side of my mouth.
"But are you laughing at him or laughing with him? Usually I'm just laughing at [my husband]," she continued on.
I squared myself up. "No...he's a laugh a minute. Seriously, nothing's funnier then when we're laying on the couch and he cuts the biggest, loudest, stinkiest fart in the middle of some really sad, dramatic TV show. He really has the most innate sense of inappropriate timing. It's fucking hilarious."
She was honestly just speechless and couldn't decide if I was kidding or making small talk (for the record, I was making inappropriate, wine-fuelled, small talk because, as I've warned everyone before, I just have no good social skills, especially when I'm dressed in a tux surrounded by juiced Republicans). We were basically left alone for the rest of the evening after that which was just fine.
November's Housewarming Groove Tracks:
1. Ain't No Sunshine (Groove Corporation Remix)...Stryke
2. Tyron ... Erykah Badu: Live
3. Ocean Drive (Original Album Mix) ...Madison Park
4. My Lover's Gone ...Dido
5. Fade Into You ...Mazzy Star
6. Ordinary World ... Kurt Nilsen
7. I'll Be There (Soul Mekanik Remix) ... Weekend Players
8. Honey ... Venus Hum
9. Glory Box ... Portishead
10. Feelin' Good (Joe Claussel Remix) ... Nina Simone
11. The Great Escape (Carmen Rizzo Mix) ... BT
The price one pays for ignoring the inner workings of the blog machine is to be faced with deleting over 750 ill-begotten comments from the likes of those who'd like you to enter illicit poker tournaments, try lifestyle enhancement medications ('hard-on pills' for those not in the lingo), or increase the size of your already adequate penises and ba-zooms. It only took me the better part of the last two weeks of consistent deletion to finally get to a place where there aren't twenty-five comments a day being posted to old entries. I've also not only closed every old entry to commenting but am making it a point to close new entries after two or three weeks after posting to avoid this bitch of a time-waster in the future. I'm in graduate school for God's sake...you think I need a time wasting activity significantly more mind-numbing than the video game I already play all the time?
And I do apologize for the approval notification message everyone gets when they want to post a comment, but I thought it was the lesser of the two evils, the other forcing everyone to register before their comments are posted. Of course the last option was to ditch comments all together, but I hate doing that because, sadly, everyone's comments actually validate my existence and provide the entire foundation for my self-esteem.
Like everyone else, I'm not getting the flu shot this year and I'm a nurse and work in a hospital. Of course I'm not doing patient care and that's the requirement for the shot but I'm OK with it. I'm relatively young and healthy so I'd rather someone who really needs the shot get mine. My 80-something year old grandmother is going without so I'd like to think, idealistically, that someone in need is getting my dose. That being said, for anyone living on Pluto who doesn't know, the single BEST thing you can do to protect yourself at any time of year, not just the cold and flu season, is WASH YOUR DAMN, DIRTY HANDS. Wash them all the time, with the hottest water you can stand and regular soap. I say this because working (and now living) in NYC, I regularly ride the subways and buses and we know that means I come into contact daily with poop, Ebola, and other assorted micro-organisms smeared on the handrails and seats of public transporation, doornobs, and any piece of common office equiptment available. I make it a routine practice to wash anytime I come in from outside and even though I'm a nervous, hand-wringing, anxiety-prone, worry wart, I've consciously willed myself to stop my neurotic ticks like fiddling with my contacts and picking my nose. Keep your damn, dirty hands away from your face! My new best friend is antibacterial hand sanitizer which I have stashed at home, in the office, and in the cars. I use it anytime I can't get to a sink to wash and periodically throughout the day. Are antibacterial washes helping to create antibiotic-resistant super strains? Uh, maybe...but then again, that's someone elses poop you just touched during that handshake or on that cup of Dunkin Doughnut's coffee someone just handed you.
