EJ Takes Life

new site at tumblr

2008-01-09T20:29:00.000Z

Hello...?

*crickets*

So... you may have noticed I was gone for a while. That was kind of intentional on my part. For a time, I had three big things occupying my mind. One of them was paper that tried very hard to break my brain. It only partly succeeded. The second was a boy situation that I knew was a bad idea, that the boy knew was a bad idea, that the very few people I told about it told me was a bad idea, but I went ahead with it anyways. Because I'm a sucker for lost causes, and because it gets lonely at the holidays. That's done now, hopefully for good, and everyone emerged unscathed. But it was something that, for a lot of reasons, I didn't and won't write about again, at least not until I get some much-needed distance. Like, say, to another continent.

The final reason was the family situation to which I alluded a while ago. It got worse, much worse, and though it too has somewhat resolved itself, not everybody emerged as unscathed. People said some very hurtful, even unforgivable things in the course of it, and it took a lot out everyone involved. I was expressly forbidden from writing about it, in part because there could have been legal ramifications and there almost certainly would have been emotional ones. Someday I might write about the lessons I took from it, because I watched carefully from the sidelines and learned a lot about how to communicate with people whose views clash with your own, how to get your desired outcome on someone else's terms and when to stop talking even though you have more to say. But for now, it's way too soon and way too messy to write on it, even for private consumption only.

People in bad or boring situations generally don't write well. They whine well, but there's plenty of that in the world and I didn't want to contribute more. I would rather not blog at all than have a "here's what I ate for lunch today" or "why I'm voting for Obama" or "what my New Year's resolutions are" blog. There's a place for that kind of writing, and it's called a journal. I don't begrudge people who write indulgently, lazily, or selfishly. That is their right, and usually, if they intend to become good writers, a necessary evil. Good writers are made, not born, and everyone has off days, weeks, even off seasons. But whether people want to admit it or not, there is a huge pool of mediocrity in personal blogging, one that, by starting dozens of entries complaining about life in unspecific and highly unoriginal terms, I felt like I was contributing to.

Some people power through and manage to break out of a bad cycle. I turn to a different platform for inspiration.

I started a blog at Tumblr on a whim and found myself really liking it. If Blogger and Typepad can be thought of as journals or diaries, Tumblr is a scrapbook. I enjoy the encouragement to post frequently and without excessive text. It's been a fun challenge to keep myself from rambling on like I usually do, to make words and phrases count for more and let content speak for itself. Perhaps most blessedly of all, this format help keep a blog largely free of the triteness that plagues so much of personal blogging (a crime that I do not in any way exempt myself from-- there may well be a screenshot of EJ Takes Life in the dictionary under "Navel-Gazing").

I may come back to Blogger eventually, but right now am really enjoying Tumblr. So please, update your bookmarks and links, because EJ is settling in for the long haul over there.

Oh, and if you didn't know what "EJ" stood for:

emmyjean.tumblr.com

amusing things my dad says vol. III

2007-11-30T23:10:00.000Z

On our collected response to the latest family crisis:

"We are a bunch of nerdy, anal-retentive-y... nerds."

heart smart

2007-11-27T19:59:00.000Z

Due to some recent Human Resources shenanigans at work, I've been tracking my paycheck deposits pretty closely over the last few weeks. Traditionally I've not always been the greatest with money. Though I'm now ruthless about paying off my credit card in full each month and, after some pretty typical post college carelessness (oops, Verizon bill fell behind the bar again!) generally am not late with things, I really have no idea how my paycheck is calculated each month. To ape the Friends episode, I don't really know who FICA is or why the hell he gets all my money. I have no idea why I've paid over a thousand dollars out of pocket for medical bills in the last year when insurance gobbles up a chunk of my salary. I just know that magic money faeries put enough money into my checking account every other week to keep me from having to borrow nickels to pay for a Metro fare, like I did immediately following college graduation. That was not a fun time for EJ.

Like most overeducated and underemployed young adults in DC, I live paycheck to paycheck. I've never known anything else and, given my education and professional choices, probably won't know anything else for a long time. I figure I'll just marry rich and then justify my shallowness by calling it fourth-wave feminism. Perhaps I'll become one of those fabulous stay-at-home moms I see in Washingtonian who live in Georgetown and wear lots of Lilly Pulitzer. I'll run a "freelance lifestyle consulting business" where I charge clients several thousand dollars for advice such as "live in Georgetown" and "wear lots of Lilly Pulitzer."

But for now I'm okay with the job I have and track I'm on because there are other benefits, financial and otherwise. It pays my tuition. It exposes me to lots of interesting and brilliant people. It gives me a super-cheap gym membership.

Let's consider that last a bit, yes?

In my obsessive monitoring, I noticed an out-of-cycle deposit for over $500. Though my employer owed me a rather large sum, this didn't fit the deposit schedule I'd worked out with HR. So I clicked on the electronic check to see what was up, only to see that it was a refund from my gym.

That's right. My gym has refunded my last year's worth of payments. My gym has given up on me.

In my defense, I hate my gym. I hate that it's full of 90-pound teenagers who hog the ellipticals while sporting full makeup and cropped Prada workout uniforms. I'm sure that when they look at me, in my pilly GAP circa-1998 bootcut running pants and whatever T-shirt I got from a college teambuilding retreat, they shudder and say to themselves "please let that never be me." Which is a totally understandable reaction, since when I work out I'm projecting frustration, anger and perspiration in equal and substantial amounts.

And it's not like I haven't been working out. There are the dance classes, the weights at home, the despised morning and late night runs...

Oh, forget it. Who am I kidding? My gym totally gave up on me. Some asshole with 3% body fat probably saw my record and said "this girl clearly needs more money for Hostess Cupcakes. Let's take pity on her."

Well, joke's on you, Anonymous Archetypal Gym Person! I don't even eat any Hostess products! I'm totally taking my $500 and investing it in heart-smart vegetables, whole grains and lean proteins, right after I finish this chocolate croissant and venti vanilla latte. HAH.

the planning for urban orphan thanksgiving 2008 starts now

2007-11-27T02:14:00.001Z

This is a drawing my cousin's son did on Thanksgiving. It shows me at the top of the "Kids" section.

It, and my father's cornbread stuffing, were pretty much the highlights of the holiday. Not that the holiday or the 20+ character family reunion were in and of themselves awful, any more so than any single 25-year old woman's Thanksgiving in rural Indiana. It was more what happened after my plane left on Saturday that has left me wondering exactly when my family became one of those families who has to deal with crap that we were only supposed to see on blurry late-night reruns of COPS. We were not supposed to be one of those families.

I don't know yet if or how I'll ever write about the news my grandfather's wife dumped on the family after I left on Saturday morning. Suffice it to say that it was bad, and it was very good that I wasn't there when she called this particular family meeting, because my response since finding out about it has employed a vocabulary that would most certainly not be welcome at the kids' table.

I hope that you all had a very lovely Thanksgiving, and that the worst thing you had to deal with was your mother loudly sighing that she wishes you'd find a nice boy/girlfriend. I miss when that was the worst part of my Thanksgiving.

sparks may cause punctuation and caps lock abuse. please consume responsibly.

2007-11-21T18:37:00.000Z

Look, some people just have to learn the hard way that Sparks is a bad, bad, bad drink. They don't listen when their friends tell them horror stories of waking up in the middle of the night with severe heart palpitations several days later, or of snapping out of a fog at their desk the next morning and realizing they have no idea how they drove from Dupont to Dulles but are still way too drunk to drive home but way too wired to stay at work and not have co-workers wonder what they've been snorting, so the only alternative is to tell people that they were going home sick and then sleep it off in the car until they sobered up enough to drive home.

After last night I now can say from experience that the combination of Sparks, four vodka Red Bulls, Art Brut and the Hold Steady will do at least one if not all of the following to the average, healthy American female:

1) dance and screech with such enthusiasm that the soreness of her feet is topped only by the soreness of her throat
2) loudly inform her friend that she's so wired she's going to grab that guy over there and either punch him or make out with him, maybe both, then quickly realize that she said this with enough forcefulness and volume that the guy heard her and consequently looks rather terrified and is backing away
3) cause her to get up in the middle of the night for water, run into a wall, then punch the wall because it was TOTALLY THE WALL'S FAULT
4) oversleep until the exact moment she is supposed to BE at the office, then punch the same wall again BECAUSE IT IS STILL TOTALLY THE WALL'S FAULT
5) show up at the office late sporting jeans, unwashed postconcert hair and a giant black smudge on her cheek from sleeping on her stamped hand, prompting a co-worker to take one look at her and start laughing hard enough to give himself a hernia
6) order and consume an entire super-size Wendy's # 3 meal at 11 AM
7) be so wired and jittery thirteen hours later that typing a short blog post takes a good 35 minutes

Over Thanksgiving dinner my bitchy aunt will ask me what the heck I'm doing with my life down there in our nation's capital. I anticipate it being the second time in my life I am completely and totally without any kind of response whatsoever.

vigilante

2007-11-15T20:01:00.000Z

Yesterday while reading Jezebel I came across the story of a Missouri teenager who committed suicide after receiving mean messages from a boy she liked on MySpace. Oh, but it gets so much worse. The "boy" was actually her ex-friend's mother. The mother knew that this girl had struggled with depression. The mother, upon learning the girl had killed herself, expressed no remorse because the poor girl had tried to hurt herself before.

It is so very sickening, I can't recount all the horrible details. Suffice it to say that reading the story of this poor girl's life and death, I understand the vigilante urge for mob justice. I want to call this woman and scream at her that she's the reason a child is dead. I want to show up at her business and spit on her. I want to stand on her front lawn and wait until she comes out to get her mail and then lash out at her with my fists and words.

Obviously I won't be doing any of those things, but it's noteworthy that I want to because I'm not an especially violent or vengeful person. I'm firmly in the "eye-for-an-eye makes everyone blind" approach to justice.

In 2001, when the DC sniper was crawling around local parking lots shooting strangers at random, I appeared on an MSNBC talk show to talk about what it was like going to school in DC in a post-September 11 world (no, I don't remember which show-- it was MSNBC, aren't they all the same?). When the host asked me if I thought the DC sniper should get the death penalty when he was caught, I said no. The host really pressed me, saying things like "but he's obviously evil and disturbed," and "so would you want him living next door to you?" I kept my cool and responded that morals only meant something if you held to them under the toughest circumstances, so no, I would not want the death penalty for the DC sniper. The host got pissed that he couldn't break me and went to commercial.

Overlooking the fact that I managed to be so sanctimonious at nineteen, you can get my basic point. I'm not a violent person. I use my words, and I use lots of them. But I think of this woman, her total lack of remorse, the fact that there are no laws on the books to protect people from online harassment, the gall it takes to press charges for property destruction against the parents of the child you drove to suicide, and I want to cause her pain.

It seems especially cruel that an adult woman would inflict those kind of mind games on a teenage girl. Believe me when I say that every day, I'm thankful that I never have to go back and do adolescence again. It was bad enough the first time, and not to sound too critical of today's whippersnappers, it was still not this bad back in my day. I can watch My Super Sweet 16 as an adult and make grand pronouncements about Today's Youth and Consumer Culture, but I never had one of those girls running my sophomore class. I had other girls say mean things about me in the halls (and to be fair, I also said mean things about other girls in the halls) but they were never captured and preserved for posterity online. There's not enough money in the world to make me repeat those years, but much rather I'd do it again as I experienced it than start over again today.

Since both geography and the bounds of human decency keep me from lashing out at this woman the way I would like to, I would add here for any teenage girls who happen to stumble across: I'm so sorry. This totally the worst time in your life. I get it, I really do. You have to get up really early and spend all day learning a lot of stuff you won't ever use, surrounded by a lot of people who can be really, really mean. And the adults around you... well, a lot of them don't get that it sucks. A few do, but they are few and far between, and their hands are tied by all sorts of regulations and rules and they're crazy busy and overworked. And a lot of stuff like, oh, watching out for the kind of non-violent but insanely cruel mental warfare that only teenage girls can inflict with such brutality... well, it gets lost in the shuffle. I totally get why you think life sucks. If I had to do that all over again, I would think life sucked, too.

So take this lesson from your Big Sis EJ to heart: right now it sucks, but it gets so much better. I promise! People start to chill out around your junior year of high school, and from there it's only a short time until college. And you can be anything you want in college! Experiment with bisexuality and Republican politics in the same year! Go to Italy on study abroad and make out with a European dude! Take Psych 101 and later tell all your roommates about how sad the monkey experiment was!

And then you go to work, where they have rules about the people you spend your days with being awful bitches to one another (unless you work in fashion, media or in politics, in which case... well, good luck). Trust me, your harried seventh-grade homeroom teacher has nothing on a Human Resources department.

Just hold on, and know that everyone-- and I do mean everyone-- is secretly terrified that they are weird and abnormal and strange and that everyone else knows it.

Oh, and my own little contribution besides posting here? I forwarded this to a friend who forwarded it to this guy. Who wrote this. And yes, there is some kind of poetic justice in that the internet, the same medium, they used to destroy this girl, is the same tool that is going to hold them accountable.

anatomy of an unsuccessful booty call

2007-11-12T04:39:00.000Z

Step 1: Attend multiple parties, overdrinking cheap red wine all the while, before ending up at a sex toy party.

Step 2: Spend money you do not have on items of dubious morality. Later, you will blame your subsequent credit card bill on the combination of said red wine, peer pressure and a surprisingly persuasive saleswoman. For the time being, giddily compare your new purchases with those of your other friends.

Step 3: Cab to Adams Morgan.

Step 4: Adams Morgan hideously Adams Morgan-y. No one should have to deal with two consecutive nights of drunken AU sophomores, Amstel Lite and Fergie. Split.

Step 5: Decide new purchases warrant immediate testing. Mull over who to call in for help with said testing: Option A or Option B. Decide it's too soon for Option A, text Option B.

Step 6: Exchange increasingly R-rated series of texts with Option B. Option B being obnoxiously recalcitrant, expressing concern about the wisdom of the acts being proposed and wondering "if this is such a good idea." Get very frustrated. Hello! Trying to make a stupid but entertaining decision here! Now is not the time to develop a protective concern for emotional well-being!

Step 7: Get very salty and belligerent that Option B did not immediately drop his plans and hoof it over to your apartment. Stumble back into apartment, pour self another glass of wine, keep CFM boots on in case Option B does get his act together and come over right away.

Step 8: Receive text: "are u going to be up for a while?" Think to yourself "hell to the nawh!" Text back never to mind, manage to remove CFM boots, pass out on couch watching Dazed and Confused.

Step 9: Option B upgrades to calling: "are you sure you don't want me to come over?" Respond curtly that the moment has passed and slap your phone shut.

Step 10: Briefly consider Option A again, but quickly remind yourself that no, the only idea worse than Option B right now would be Option A.

Step 11: Receive text from Option B apologizing for being lame. Saucily respond that he should be, you were at a sex toy party earlier in the night. Smile as you picture the expression on his face when he reads this text.

Step 12: Don't acknowledge next text from Option B, though it has moved into decidedly X-rated territory. He had his chance earlier.

Now, where did you put the triple-A batteries?

and don't even think about wearing your ironic hipster burqa to class

2007-11-09T18:06:00.000Z

To: The Female Student Body of The Education Corporation

From: EJ, Associate Provost for Unsolicited Opinions, Office of the Prevention of Questionable Fashion

Re: The Keffiyeh as Accessory
_____________________________________________________

Dear Women of the Education Corporation,

It has come to our attention that a significant portion of you have recently been wearing keffiyeh as an accessory, most commonly as a scarf. On a recent stroll around campus, no less than five of you were spotted with keffiyeh jauntily wrapped around your necks. Of this pool, all subjects were also wearing leggings, three subjects were wearing Ugg or Ugg-esque boots and one subject was sporting a sweatshirt bearing the Greek letters for a Jewish sorority, a juxtaposition that caused at least one Corporation administrator to ask her companion "Am I actually seeing this, or did an IED just go off in my brain?"

The administration of the Education Corporation cannot condone such wardrobe choices on the part of its student body.

You students may well have "had, like, a totally spiritual experience" while on your birthright trips over the summer. However, the fact that you once spent a day on a kibbutz with other nineteen-year-olds from Syosset does not mean you may, with any authenticity or credibility, wear keffiyeh on your person. That you purchased the keffiyeh at Urban Outfitters, alongside a $32 Transformers t-shirt, does not help your case.

We are prepared to offer case-by-case exceptions to individuals who can demonstrate that they are of Palestinian origin and/or express a sophisticated identification with and sympathy for the PLO. Moreover, the administration of the Education Corporation is sensitive to the fact that college is a time to try on new identities, often with varying degrees of success. To that end, we remain sympathetic to any undergraduate who allows his or her daily behavior, personality and approach to personal hygiene to be affected by any of the following:

Ayn Rand
Clove cigarettes
Jean-Paul Sartre
The entire oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman. And Lasse Hallstrom. Basically, Swedish cinema in general
Immanuel Kant
Che Guevara
Interpol
The belief that Communism could be a valid method of social and political organization, it's just that it hasn't yet been adopted under the proper circumstances

The Education Corporation has a tradition of success of ending unfortunate trends in neckwear, most notably bringing to a close the Great Burberry Plague of 2001-2004. We now appeal to your common sense, asking you to recognize that by en masse donning a symbol of anti-establishment rebellion, you drain the keffiyeh of all its political and social significance. Plus, you look stupid.

We wish you the best of luck with the end of the semester, and look forward to seeing your more culturally-sensitive accessories in the New Year.

Regards,

EJ

almost

2007-11-06T20:39:00.000Z

When I first decided to do NaBloPoMo this year, I didn't have much of a plan for how I would actually fulfill the daily posting requirement. A few days later, having already fallen off the wagon, it occurred to me that I should really be writing more about my family. Not the writing I often do, where I bitch about various extended family members who themselves bitch about me, but documenting stories of the people and memories I cherish.

My father almost died this year. It sounds so melodramatic to phrase his illness, subsequent surgery and post-surgery complications like this. He would never use these words to describe his encounters with medicine over the last twelve months. I have never used them when talking about his health with him or another family member, despite being there for the especially painful aftermath.

Being in the thick of it, focusing on trying to stay positive and celebrating that he was getting the royal treatment at a great hospital, kept all of us from acknowledging the reality of the situation. It took a close family friend squeezing my hand several weeks after his surgery, her eyes swimming with maternal tears as she said "You know your father almost died, right?" for me to realize, oh, wow. Dad did almost die. And I was in no way ready to say goodbye to him.

My memory of the weeks leading up to his surgery last December is fuzzy at best, but I remember feeling spectacularly guilty that he was dealing with this alone. I remember my irrational, unhelpful anger at my mother for not being able to leave her new job to be with him, at my sister's school for having the nerve to give her finals right as he was dealing with the possibility that his heart would give out at any moment. My fury at my own work for keeping me chained to a desk in Washington as Dad sat a dark, empty house in Michigan, a malfunctioning time bomb ticking in his chest. I pictured him sitting quietly with our elderly family cat curled up in his lap, the two of them bathed in the tinny blue glow of Law and Order reruns, trying not to think about the life-saving surgery that kept being postponed and falling asleep alone on the sofa, and my own heart broke.

The surgery was a success and he began healing faster than anyone expected. Dad was determined to be the valedictorian of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and would push himself to walk extra laps past the nurses' station and the courtyard. If other people recovered in five days, he would do it in three. He surprised everyone by coming home several days earlier than expected with a clean bill of health and very positive prognosis. Our immediate family spent a perfect Christmas together at our cabin, the women of the family eating and drinking Dad's share of the holiday feast and all of us stinking up the joint in our grungy pajamas as we watched endless DVDs and played Operation, congratulating ourselves on our gallows humor. We split off at the New Year to our four separate homes, Dad going back downstate to camp out in our old house with his aunt and uncle until he was safe to be alone.

Dad was pan-frying pork chops in vinegar when he got the first pangs. He wrote them off as more soreness from the incision and didn't tell his aunt and uncle something was wrong. Less than a day later he was doubled over, practically hallucinating from the pain. In not wanting to make a big deal and worry his family, he ignored what turned out to be a major abscess on his gallbladder. By the time he told his aunt and uncle, the infection had destroyed his gallbladder and was starting to attack his other internal organs. Dad was in so much pain his uncle decided they shouldn't wait for an ambulance. Somehow they loaded him into the back of the car and set off for the hospital, but Dad was so out of it he couldn't give them directions and, being from out of state, they had no idea where to go.

Luckily, they drove by a police car. When they told the officer what was going on he told them to follow him. The cops put on their sirens and escorted them to the nearest hospital, speeding through the streets of downtown Lansing. When they got to the ER, Dad couldn't sit or stand up, much less get out of the car. They managed to get him inside, where he blacked out from the pain. He only dimly remembers being told he needed emergency surgery to remove his gallbladder or any of the 48 hours that followed. He did tell me several weeks later that he remembered thinking this was it. He said he was in no way ready to go because his family wasn't with him, but that he knew he was loved.

Even then, I don't know if I got how bad it was. I read back over the various blog posts I wrote during those weeks about returning to Michigan to take care of him as he recovered from his second surgery, and I'm embarrassed at how little they have to do with him. By focusing on the details of the HR paperwork to take advantage of the Family Medical Leave Act, or venting my feelings on friends and strangers, I put off acknowledging the fact that my father almost died and I wasn't there with him. That for how close my family is, how much we genuinely enjoy one another's company and value each other, however generous we are with our phone calls and "I love yous" and advice, one of us almost died and the rest of us were too busy with life to be there when it happened. By focusing on the obnoxious, irrelevant minutiae of the situation I wrote myself a free pass for this unforgivable truth.

Of course, he would never in a million years hold this against me or any other member of our family. He says he now looks back on the whole thing as a learning experience, something that has taught him that he's not Superman and that he needs to pay attention to his limits. He still works way too hard and holds himself to impossible standards, but he's also more attuned to his priorities. After he recovered from the gallbladder surgery he started making inroads to repair major rifts in our extended family, efforts that have already begun to pay off in emailed family legends and wedding invitations from long-lost cousins. It would be a stretch to say that he's grateful for the experience, but he's certainly handled his dalliance with mortality with more grace and diginity than most people would.

Thinking of where he and our family are this holiday season, versus where we were a year ago, I feel much like I do when I walk by the White House or Capitol. Having lived in DC during September 11, I'm acutely aware of the sacrifice of people of United Flight 93. Today when I walk by the White House or Capitol I can't help but think "there but for the grace of God...," and it's the same with Dad. Had he stayed with the first cardiologist who told him he needed more exercise, had he not had the Mick Jagger of cardiothoracic surgeons, had he waited even an hour longer to tell his aunt and uncle he was in pain, had that police car not been there to escort them to the hospital... these few small decisions and coincidences are why he is still here today.

Much as I am with the sacrifice of the passengers of United 93, I find myself knocked over with gratitude for whatever force in the universe allowed that period to unfold as it did. I am humbled by a chain of events that I don't understand. I am overwhelmed with love for my father and my family. To say that I will never again take them for granted would be unrealistically Pollyanna-ish of me, but to this day, I remain enthralled by my capacity to love them ferociously and endlessly, without condition or hesitation.

And in my own myopic, navel-gazing way, I am thankful for the reminder that they will not be here forever and that there are only so many days to tell people that they are loved.

amusing things my father has said in the last seventy-two hours

2007-11-05T21:13:00.001Z

"I don't think I should be sending flowers to my gay boss."

"Your mother keeps buying red leather couches. Our house is starting to look like the set of Caligula as interpreted by Pottery Barn."

Responding to my noting that it didn't seem very nice to be talking about another family member behind her back: "But sweetie, that's why people have backs."

but it's the last time i have to go there for another two years

2007-11-02T20:53:00.000Z

I recently had to spend a Saturday afternoon at the DMV to take care of some paperwork. Normally, this would be about as fun as... well, spending a Saturday afternoon at the DMV to take care of some paperwork. But a strange combination of unseasonably warm weather, a jolly female security guard who went around assigning nicknames to various patrons (most notably "Clark Gable, Jr." to one especially well-dimpled guy) and speedy lines wound up creating a carnival-like atmosphere in the waiting room. People were laughing with strangers. People were smiling. There was actual applause when they shut the doors and announced that they weren't taking new people.

A cute guy took the seat next to me and we wound up chatting, despite the fact that I was wearing a ratty tee from the summer camp I was a counselor at in college and the only concessions I'd made to personal hygiene were brushing my teeth and slapping on deodorant. It was entirely on the basis of my sparkling wit and innate charm that after two hours of waiting and talking, when I finally made it up to the teller, the guy came up behind me and handed me his number and email written on the back of his ticker number.

Did I mention he was a Republican male model? Because he was a Republican male model.

Contrast this ridiculously entertaining encounter with DC bureaucracy to this morning. I went in to work only to get my doctor's name from my Outlook, as the cold I've been fighting for three weeks finally broke into a vile hacking cough that rattled my lungs. My doctor is by Georgetown, and since I had some time to kill before he saw me, I thought I'd swing by the DMV in the Mall That Happiness Forgot to finish up the last bit of documentation. Because this is how my brilliant mind works. Fever? Phlegmy cough? Unshowered and greasy bangs matted to forehead? Wearing glasses? Perfect time to get a new driver's license photo!

In my defense, I was just trying to update my parking sticker. I didn't intend to get a new license with my new address. The DMV Lady, however, had other plans and held my new sticker hostage until I got my license updated with my new address (y'know, the one I moved into in April. I'm so on top of things). This broke my heart because my old license photo was one of the best pictures ever taken of me. It's seriously more flattering than my high school senior portraits. Replacing it with something doomed to be unflattering, even ugly, would make me emotional even if I wasn't so stopped up that my entire head already felt like it was leaking.

In the end, the picture wasn't hideous. But it's not good, either. Both the cold and my contempt for District bureaucracy are written all over my face. I'm wearing the same sweatshirt I'm wearing in my passport picture, which was taken outside the US Consulate in Barcelona after my traveler's wallet was stolen in the spring of 2005. So that's some nice synchronicity, I suppose.

But most annoyingly, I didn't even pick up a male model. Just as soon as I started to think the DMV was a magical place, reality brought me crashing back down to earth.

the road to hell...

2007-11-01T17:44:00.000Z

I'm going to try NaBloPoMo again. Last year I made it up to Thanksgiving, but was ultimately thwarted by a lack of internet connection and inspiration. This year I begin my quest encumbered by school and language lessons, but for now I remain optimistic that I'll sack up and manage to at least post a cheeky Youtube clip once a day for the next month.

I've got a few ideas for posts percolating, but could use some suggestions. Anything you want to know? Anything I should avoid like the plague? For other bloggers, what is your favorite device for filling space when you can't think of anything remotely interesting but your last post has been lingering at the top of your page for so long it's starting to smell funky?

robert goulet, robert goulet, my god, robert goulet!

2007-10-31T01:20:00.001Z

I hope that I'm this much of a mischievous rapscallion right before I hit the big proscenium in the sky:

checking in

2007-10-29T14:02:00.000Z

There are some women who, upon realizing that the cute new minidress they tried on with leggings and flat knee-high boots in the store is borderline obscene when paired with black tights and heels, will change into something more appropriate for work.

I am not one of those women.

Oh, and hi. Didn't mean to be so long there. Diplomatic and imperial history have been so fascinating I simply cannot tear myself away.

Okay, fine, I've been watching Gossip Girl and drinking too much Barolo in New York and spending money I don't have on things I don't need. Are you happy now?

what's my motivation here?

2007-10-19T14:22:00.001Z

I auditioned for a play last weekend. Because I have all this spare time and everything, like school and work and attempts to have somewhat of a life simply aren't fulfilling enough.

In all seriousness, I auditioned because I love, love, love the playwright's work and because the structure of the play would actually work fine with my insane schedule. And even though I'm ridiculously busy these days, it's within very structured contexts. The things I'm filling the days with don't leave a lot of room for freedom of conversation. It's either diplomatic history or advising students or practicing basic, flubbing, present-tense German. There are only so many times one can ask Gerhardt for a stadtplan before one craves verbal sparring, the freedom to move unrestricted to new ideas and topics. Ironically enough, the context of a play allows actors to do just that. Even though lines are written and mush be read, there's a tremendous freedom in trying on someone else's identity, however fleeting the moment is. It involves give and take with another person, a discussion of motivation, of quickly asking the kinds of questions people typically take lifetimes to address: why do I do the things I do? Why do I say the things I say? What do I want here? Why can't I see the obvious?

So I auditioned, and the director liked me, and said she had me in mind for one part. It wasn't at all the part I'd seen myself playing, but I was flattered by her attention and appreciated the challenge to try something new. Here's where it gets weird.

Because I'd only attended the callback and not the initial audition, the director wanted to see me read again. She said she like what she saw and that I had good chemistry with the lead actor, but she wanted to see how I responded to direction. Could I read for her again? And could I scrounge up a guy friend to read opposite?

This was strange. A good actor should be able to read lines opposite a monotone casting director and still make their character work. Recruiting a random guy, a non-actor, to read opposite struck me as really weird. Yes, it's a play about relationships, but if all she was testing was how well I responded to direction, why the need to read opposite a non-actor guy, especially since she already had the actor cast?

But I was flattered to be asked to read again and loved the material, so I told her I'd do it. My wonderful friend G agreed to be "the guy" after I bribed him with the offer of beer afterwards, and we met the director on Wednesday night to read some lines. Here's where it gets very weird.

The director had a very specific vision in mind for the character. So specific, in fact, that after G and I had read maybe ten lines, she stopped us and acted out the scene the way she wanted to see it done. Poor G, he had no idea that when I asked him to do me this favor he'd end up in a tiny basement piano room with a strange 40-year-old woman screaming "why didn't you love me enough?!" in his face.

You actors out there will support me when I say that this is strange. Acting isn't like dancing, where the choreographer will show a dancer exactly how a particular move should be executed and then the dancer imitates it. If actors are imitating the way a line is read or a gesture is made, it's just caricature. For a character to be believable to an audience, the actor has to organically make it her own. A director tells an actor where to take their interpretation, to make it more intense or quick or vulnerable, but acting is not supposed to be flat imitation. Of course I am going to have a different spin on this character than this director who is much older and blonder and shorter than me. Either of our interpretations could be valid, but she's the director and so hers is the one she's going with. Just don't try to shoehorn an actor into something that is not a good fit. Yes, it's the actor's job to fulfill the director's vision. But if the actor isn't going to fill that vision, flat imitation is not the way to go.

Maybe she liked me and didn't want to hurt my feelings, but shit, actors have to have thick skins. Back when I still thought I might someday do this for real (a looooong time ago) I had directors tell me I was too tall, too fat, too aggressive, not aggressive enough, that I should consider a nose job if I was serious about ever acting professionally, that I blinked too much, that I was never going to be an ingenue but wasn't "unique" enough to be a character actor. And those are just the ones I remember.

It sounds brutal, but was actually terrific. It taught me an incredibly valuable lesson: that rejection will happen, and it will usually happen for reasons beyond your immediate control. Because it's a rejection not of you, but of you for a specific part, you can't take it personally when someone says "you're not right for this." There are always other opportunities out there, especially when you just act as a hobby and happily pay the bills with something else.

After I'd caved and imitated her line-reading, she thanked me profusely while hedging her bets. She said she loved me, just loved what I did, that I was lovely on stage and had a lovely way about me, but she still wasn't sure and wanted another day to think about it. I knew right then that I wasn't going to get this part, and, more importantly, that I didn't want it anymore.

So when she called this morning, I wasn't at all surprised when she said she wasn't going to offer it to me. I was surprised, however, when she outlined her plan. "I'm going to audition a few more people," she said, "and then if none of them work out, go back to my list of a few favorites, of which you're at the top. So could you maybe hold your schedule for the next few weeks?" It was basically the theater equivalent of telling someone after a few dates that you're not really into them, but could you put them on the back burner while you see if you can get anyone hotter?

I told her thanks, but no thanks, that I had holiday travel and a spring semester to plan and couldn't wait for her decision. I'm pretty glad it worked out this way, because I'm clearly not what she's looking for. This would have been an amazing part to play, and I loved all the ideas I had bouncing around my head for it. The dialogue is so meaty that the actors can practically chew on it, and I really did have great chemistry with the lead actor and am bummed that now I won't get to work with him. But it would have killed me to not be able to use my ideas for the character and instead try to imitate the director's vision, which was clearly such a bad fit for me.

And honestly, I'm a little ticked that she got my hopes up when all along she was completely unwilling to be open to something new. If she'd just told me I was too fat, I'd probably have warmer feelings towards her now.

And people wonder why actors are insane.

the most emotionally bleak series of events possible, not involving mass genocide or barney

2007-10-14T22:02:00.000Z

HOLY GOD.

People, if you learn anything at all from me, learn this: never, ever, ever, watch the movie Hard Candy and less than a day later spend three hours at an audition reading Neil LaBute dialogue with a progression of strange men.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some curling up in a ball and whimpering to attend to.

white liberal guilt

2007-10-10T15:36:00.000Z

Sitting at the bar at Matchbox waiting for K to arrive, I idly flipped the pages of my latest foreign policy tome, half-reading and half-listening to the guy sitting next to me drone on to his bored date about the challenges of owning two vacations homes. I'd gotten to the point in reading where I was only semi-processing the words as I read them, the structure of the narrative voice drifting in one ear and out the other as occasional nuggets like "Jeffersonian liberty" or "Open Door Policy" latched on the walls of my brain.

As I sipped my water the bartender appeared to take my drink order. I asked for a Stella and looked back down at my book, but realized a moment later that she was still standing there, also looking down at it. I lifted my eyes to see her half-craning her head, as if to catch something written in it. This was the moment when I realized in horror that the chapter heading, splashed in big bold letters at the top of the page, was "The Hierarchy of Race."

Now would be a good moment to clarify that she was black and I'm white.

We looked up from the chapter heading at the same time and briefly met one anothers' eyes. In that brief moment of eye contact I tried to say "I am a student of history, not a pseudo-scientific Victorian eugenicist! Horrible misunderstanding! This stuff here? This is but the small-minded long-dead influence of a universally discredited theory of racial determinism and its effects on nineteenth-century policymaking! Me, I'm up with people! I led trust falls and small-group dynamic exercises as part of Students Educating Each Other About Discriminiation in high school! Down with whitey!"

Her eyes, on the other hand, seemed to convey a rather simple message of "I hate you."

Glowering, she turned away to get my beer and I bent back over my book, trying to shield the chapter heading with my cupped hand like it was an illict note passed during study hall. I flipped over to the next page just as she returned, sloshing the Stella over the side of the pint glass as she slammed it on the bar with more force than was entirely necessary. And of course, because God was watching and saw an opportunity, here's what was on the next page:

And of course, I couldn't say anything. Much like telling people you're funny or telling people you're powerful, the phrase "I'm not a racist" loses all meaning if you actually have to say it out loud to try to convince someone.

So I just hunkered down and continued reading, sipping my one Stella as slowly as possible so she wouldn't have to come over again and ask if I wanted another.

And then tipped her five bucks on a four dollar bill.

liminal space and turf restoration

2007-10-08T01:43:00.000Z

I had my first encounter with my ex-friend on Friday. She was at the Hirshorn with several people who I was once very close with. I don't think I have to tell you that it was pretty awful.

Shortly after the encounter, I left the friends I came with and went upstairs to explore the Morris Louis exhibit. This particular painting caught my eye as I wandered through the gallery, blurry-eyed and trying to hold back drunk tears. I plopped on the bench facing it, staring at the negative space in the center.

My chief complaint with modern abstract art is that it often distances itself from the viewer, letting form take precedence over content. But this painting spoke to me on Friday. It reminded me of something that I rationally know, but have a hard time believing: that being in a liminal stage can mean you're on the rise to something greater. I felt myself in the empty air, felt the effort it takes to leap to a platform I didn't plan for, at least not yet.

I know that I'll get through this stage just fine. I've gotten through it before. More importantly, I'll get through it with dignity, which is not something I've always been able to manage. Traditionally, when life hands me lemons I make lemon drop shots, heavy on the vodka, which I then throw back in life's face while telling life to fuck off. It occurs to me now that this is not the most mature way to handle rejection and disappointment.

So I won't say the unforgivable but true things I could say, I won't defend my actions or try to show why I'm right and other people are wrong. I won't make the accusations that a big part of me wants to scream out loud. Because none of it would change anything, and in the end, it's not like I'd feel better about any of it. I'm still trying to not be angry about all the wasted time and that one will take me longer. When I think of all those years, I feel raw and exposed.

But it's already better than it was. And the simple passage of time has a way of healing even the most brutal ravages.

multiple choice

2007-10-04T02:30:00.000Z

Peter Bjorn and John are the Hipster 2007 Version of...
a) the Spin Doctors
b) Deep Blue Something
c) Semisonic
d) all of the above

Michigan's mediocre playing this is season is because...
a) Chad Henne is a thoroughly mediocre QB
b) Lloyd Carr is... done
c) Shakey Jake died and sucked all the goodness out of Ann Arbor

Me going as Justin Bobby for Halloween would be...
a) utterly stupid
b) fabulous,but no one will get it
c) fabulous, and a very good barometer for who I should be friends with because people who think they are too good for The Hills are no fun at all.
d) fabulous, because all i need is a hoodie flannel with the sleeves cut off and an oversize beret. plus i'll actually be comfortable while every other girl is DC is squeezed into a too-small corset going as a slutty devil or slutty pirate or slutty WASA meter reader.

Colors of booties I should buy include...
a) black leather spats
b) gray slouchy suede
c) booties? are you kidding me? when did you become such a trend whore? stop being such a poser.
d) bright blue Victorian with jeweled buttons. hell, you're doing something that will be out in three months. do it up right.

The role of the Amateur Athletic Union in 1930s isolationist foreign policy was...
a) surprisingly large, particularly given the retrospective significance of Jesse Owens' role in the historical narrative of American triumphalism and disproving Nazi eugenics in the 1936 Olympics.
b) overstated, as minor official personnel strove to override top-down projections of isolationist policy and use the body as an entree for formal policy-related interactions.
c) brain is full. cannot do any more history. am going to watch Gossip Girls.

the anti-breakup hair

2007-10-02T01:57:00.000Z

When I broke up with my high school boyfriend (the first of three breakups with him, that is), I sliced my hair into a chin-length bob just in time for yearbook photos. I had some notion of looking like Neve Campbell circa Scream 2. Unfortunately, as my features are somewhat less delicate than hers, I more closely resembled a pre-nose job Long Island local news anchor.

After the first breakup with the college boyfriend, I went crawling back to my hometown stylist over spring break. "I'm so glad you're letting me do your college breakup hair!" he exclaimed. "It's so cyclical!" The resulting strawberry blonde highlights were an undeniable mistake on both of our parts, but the styling was all my fault. In my defense, a lot of girls bought three-pronged barrel curling irons in 2002.

I hadn't planned on doing breakup hair after losing my friend recently. Mostly this is because of the experiences described above, but mostly, any changes I've felt like making feel more like they're being brought on by other events. I've been spend more time attending events and going places where I can actually have fun with fashion, and after losing a little bit of weight from just flat not having time to eat any more, I want to mix it up a little bit. After all, this fall I finally bought (and wore!) skinny jeans. This is an achievement of fashion-- nay, history-- on par with Roo Moo-hyun crossing the DMZ line. Yes, they're technically out right now, but I already have some excellent high-waisted Navy vintage wide-legged jeans and damnit, skinny jeans were my fashion Everest.

Also, never underestimate the change in seasons to inspire change in our daily lives. No matter what weather.com says, it's autumn out there and and I simply cannot wear floaty linen circle skirts any longer. I'm ready for black tights and boots and my new sweater minidress and smudgy dark eyeliner. Usually when fall arrives I get all preppy and collegiate with baseball tees and football and little corduroy blazers and stripe-y scarves, but this year I've been taking my coffee black and listening to a lot of Charlotte Gainsbourg while walking around in my trench coat, even though it's really still too damn warm for trench coats. Basically, I want to be spending this autumn strolling down the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Narciso Rodriguez and Nanette Lepore, preferably carrying a tote with a baguette and some calla lilies engagingly peeking out the top. Hardly original, but there's a reason every girl has had this fantasy at one point or another.

I can't escape to Paris, even for a weekend, because I'm spending all my time and energy working and studying, and sadly my budget is keeping me more on the Zara end of the fashion spectrum. But tonight, unable to read another word of post-colonial deconstructionalism theory, I decided to put aside Jacques Derrida for a while in favor of Sophie Marceau:

Amazing what boredom, a change of seasons and a little pair of nail scissors can do. And for the record, it's not breakup hair. It's growing up bangs.

the difference between ten and twenty-five

2007-09-23T04:54:00.000Z

"I hate you. I want to breakup."

This was a what was scribbled on a note that Becky U. slid across my desk when we were in the fourth grade. I think I still have that note somewhere, buried in a box of childhood memorabilia. I still know the text by heart because I documented it in my youthful chickenscratch in one of the stack of journals now resting on my bottom bookshelf.

I remember how confused and angry I was when I read those words. Confused because I didn't know what I did to make her suddenly hate me. Angry because she was more popular than me, and because a rejection by her meant that none of the other girls in the class would talk to me for the rest of the week, if not longer. And of course, I was deeply hurt that my friend had suddenly decided that she hated me and didn't want to be friends with me any longer.

Yes, some things never change. But I never, ever thought that fifteen years later I would be on the receiving end of virtually the exact same written message. I never imagined that after seven years, one of my closest friends would end our friendship with a four-line email.

When you're ten and your friend tells you she doesn't want to be your friend any more, you cry. You cry, and you let it distract you from school and you go home and tell your mommy and try to listen when she says that sometimes friends say things they don't mean.

When you're twenty-five and your friend tells you she doesn't want to be your friend any more, you cry. You cry, and you let it distract you from school, and you call your mom from your car sitting outside your now-ex friend's house, trying to get it together enough to drive home without falling apart. And you try to listen when your mother says what you rationally know, that this was a long time coming. That, for all intents and purposes, you moved on from this situation a long time ago.

Still, you get angry. You get so very angry that you've spent years apologizing for growing up and moving on and getting a life. For the wasted years you've spent feeling you had to justify and defend who you are. So deeply crushed that despite your best intentions, there are things beyond your control and that even though you never wanted it to be like this, it is irrevocably like this. You yell things, things that you would never say to anyone but your mom, and only from inside the protection of a locked car.

And you know that even though this is a conflict between the two of you, other people will choose her side and you will lose them. That even if you don't lose them-lose them, her response to the situation has ruined your other friendships. This is bitter pill to swallow. It is brutally unfair. And yet, if there is anything you know by now it is that life and love rarely have anything to do with fairness.

Oh Lordy, you will be tired. You'll be utterly spent from the denouement of finally accepting what is instead of what should be or could be. You'll be angry and relieved and devastated and liberated, and lo, it will be a mess. With hard edges.

So when the nastiness has been purged, you drive to the liquor store, buy a fifty dollar bottle of champagne and go out with friends. Real friends. People who are forgiving and funny, people who you never feel guilty around, people who encourage and listen and confide and bitch and banter and smile.

You quietly drink a toast to the end of an era you're not sorry to see gone by. And when you drive home with the windows rolled down, Springsteen blaring and midnight breeze blowing your hair back, you sing along with gusto that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.

terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week

2007-09-21T20:20:00.000Z

It's now 4:24. I am going to spend the next thirty-six minutes writing a post on how, without any exaggeration or overstatement, this week has sucked hairy donkey nuts.

The friend to whom I semi-apologized yet called on her own behavior on Monday? Never wrote back.

Work, where I am doing great things and getting great results and everyone except one fairly important person loves everything I do? It's getting more and more like Sybil every day. Tune in Monday to find out what personality we encounter today! I should start placing bets. 2-1 odds on Doting Mentor over Faye Dunaway channeling Joan Crawford!

School? Have read over 400 pages in the last four days and am nowhere near close to done. All I want to do is spend the weekend drinking enough vodka so that I never feel feelings again. Instead, I will put in a token appearance at tonight's happy hour to drink a Diet Coke and will spend the rest of the weekend reading about the British rape of sub-Saharan Africa and American imperialism masquerading as development aid in the Middle East. It would have been so nice to have been a grad student before revisionist history came into vogue. For a White Liberal Guilter like me, studying has become an exercise in self-flagellation, a constant reminder of the myriad ways in which my country has consciously and systematically fucked the rest of the world for the ill-defined goal of "bettering American lives."

My holiday in Turkey? Cancelled. The friend I was going to go with bailed on me. I will now spend Thanksgiving in the small Midwestern town where my parents live, playing host to a family reunion. Because after four family weddings this year, I'm just dying for more quality time with people who think I'm a spoiled, alcoholic, snobby, bitchy slut.

Plus, the Wolverines still aren't that great and I'm very scared for the Penn State game tomorrow, I'm fighting a cold and tomorrow I have to go buy skinny jeans, an activity sure to plunge even Kate Moss into a turgid, foamy sea of self-loathing.

But on the plus side, now it's 5:00. And I think I will have at least one little gimlet at happy hour, after all.

not sorry

2007-09-19T02:40:00.000Z

Heyyy... so... it's Wednesday. Must be time to blog!

The snarky bitch in me (who takes up between 71 and 86 percent of my personality, dependent on what time of the month it happens to be) finds it really amusing when bloggers apologize for not blogging so long. For one thing, guy bloggers never do it. It's always the ladies. Maybe because women just naturally apologize for everything, using "I'm sorry" to preface everything from "would you repeat that?" to "I don't love you anymore," overuse to the point where the phrase really loses any meaning.

And it always tends to be the ladies who write about their lives on the Internet and then apologize when they infrequently and irregularly post. We say "I'm sorry" but there's not exactly regret involved. It's just a way to start when we can't think of anything else to say and diving in without an acknowledgement that we were gone for a while feels awkward and blunt.

So I'm going to buck the trend and not apologize for having three posts in three weeks. Primarily because, well, duh. Your life has somehow managed to go on. But also because I recently didn't apologize for something. Or rather I did apologize for something, but then qualified the hell out of it, placing it in context and standing up for my behavior and response. And it felt effing awesome.

I usually detest qualified apologies, and there's no phrase more likely to get my blood boiling than "I'm sorry you feel that way." It's dismissive and hostile and has nothing to do with trying to fix the circumstances that led to hurt feelings. Saying "I'm sorry," and following it with "but..." rarely leads to anything good, and I dislike that combination so much that I'll go out of the way to avoid it. I've apologized for things I wasn't really sorry for because it was easier than trying to explain why I felt the way I did, or groveled when a simple "you're right, I won't do that next time" would have sufficed.

I was also, shall we say, a rather dramatic person in my younger days. My wonder years saw unending Brenda Walsh-style fits of righteous indignation that no one would EVER understand me and the whole world and everyone in it just SUCKED, LIKE, GOD. Naturally I've come to realize how incredibly off-putting it was and am proud to say that I'm no longer such a raging bitch to be around. However, my retrospective embarassment at being so high-maintenance and defensive when I had something to apologize for has left me overanalytical. Even though there are very few people in my current life who knew me at 16, thank sweet baby Jesus, I carry the memory of how difficult it was to be around me back then. Where I once made blanket statements, I now scrutinize and second-guess to death. I doubt myself, and don't stand up for myself as much as I should. To pummel an innocent metaphor, I fear drawing a line in the sand too soon, and so I frequently leave the beach altogether.

This is especially the case when the question of my being a good friend is involved. I haven't always been. I can be selfish and thoughtless and narcissistic, I'm terrible at remembering names and faces and birthdays and I suck at making personalized crafts and presents, which for midwestern-bred gals is actually a not-insignificant thing. I'm perpetually ten minutes late to everything and I tend to take out my bad moods on the people who love me the most.

But despite these bad traits, I have some things going for me. I assume everyone I meet is a potential friend and am always, always open to getting to know new people. I will go on wacky adventures and I will do the mundane, tedious stuff like helping you move. I will never ever tell you that you need to stop talking about a certain subject, person or thought because I know what it's like to endlessly dwell on things that you rationally know are bad for you and sometimes talking it out, even over several years, is the only way to purge the bad stuff in life. I will understand when we can't get together for months on end because life keeps getting in the way. I will buy your mom shots and I will go to the hospital with you and I will cancel whatever I had going on to pour tequila down your gullet when a boyfriend breaks up with you. I will proofread your resume and your online dating profile, I will link to your blog and I will never, ever be mean to you and then try to couch it in a cowardly phrase like "I'm just being honest."

So, when I recently apologized for offending a good friend two months ago, I apologized for the hurt feelings and then basically told her to get over it. There was a miscommunication involved, it turns out-- an email she sent that I never got led to further hurt feelings on her part, quite understandably-- but in my opinion, the punishment did not fit the crime. And I called her on it. For the first time in a really long time, I qualified an apology. I told her that I never meant to hurt her feelings and was sorry that I had, and that while I was glad she had come to me about it, that the incident in question was so small and such a long time ago that I felt she really should not still be holding a grudge. Honestly? I'm still a little shaky from writing this to her. I keep checking my inbox to see if she's written me back. So far she hasn't. But twenty-four hours later and I don't regret a word of what I said.

I may be sorry for things that I've done, but I am done apologizing for being who I am. Not just because I'm better than I used to be, but because like most other folks stumbling around this rock, I'm a good person who occasionally does stupid things.

And here and now I promise you will never again see the phrase "I'm sorry for not blogging" anywhere on EJ Takes Life.

first impressions

2007-09-12T02:09:00.001Z

On my first night of class, I announced to the class that I thought the notion of informal empire was like porn.

I elucidated reasons. Everyone has a different definition for what constitutes one but they know it when they see it, the mere notion of them elicits strong emotions in audiences, and they will exist as long as there is free market capitalism.

But still. For the rest of the semester I will be The Girl Who Compared an Economic Dimension of Foreign Relations to Porn.

more people you meet in grad school

2007-09-05T02:44:00.000Z

The Professor Who Thinks He's Still Teaching Undergrads

This professor will have watched many, many episodes of Saved By The Bell and yet does not grasp that Mr. Belding is more a Touchstone than a Confucius. He wants to be your pal. He wants to put the "FUN, YEA!" in "iF yoU waNt to put a name on it, this course is prettY much just mEntal mAsturbation." He will accomplish such a goal of FUN, YEA! through the extensive use of Xeroxed Far Side and Hagar the Horrible comic strips that tangentially reference the subject matter. And slides. Lots of slides.

He will repeat the most basic and obvious points ad nauseum, so that by the end of his forty-minute long "brief illustration" of the difference between A and B, even the most hungover new freshman would be able to articulate the distinction. While underwater. In Korean. While simultaneously finding a cure for Alzheimer's and developing a strategy for making Democrats likable.

It's not that this professor is a bad person, or even a bad teacher. He's so into what he's saying that it's hard not to respect his enthusiasm. You probably would have loved having him AS a hungover freshman. But now you're a cranky twenty-five-year-old who is paying her own tuition and has to go to class after a long day of work. If something is going to take you away from kickball and The Hills and half-priced happy hour gimlets, it had better be mentally stimulating, dagnabbit. You've been doing this grad school thing for a while, and in a department where you're snidely viewed if you can't toss off bon mots in Farsi with your peers before class begins. Your standards have been raised, your innate snobbery has been validated by the badassery of your program, and despite this professor's obvious command of the material it's impossible for you to get behind a guy who passes out handouts that quote Star Trek.

You will think this blogger is exaggerating for dramatic effect. You will be wrong.

kiss de boy

2007-08-24T01:28:00.000Z

"I mean," I slurred, going on three hours of half-pints at Brew at the Zoo, "there's so much about this that I don't want to mess up. And there's so much about him," I continued, imbued with the conviction that can only stem from irresponsible weeknight boozing, "that I always said I didn't want. He's younger, he's friends with my ex..."

The girls all nodded in wide-eyed unison, like good girlfriends should when someone is telling a good boy story.

"And it's funny, we know each other so well that last night we could say things to each other like 'if we were dating, tonight would have been the best date ever!'"

M sighed a deep and heartfelt sigh. "You totally don't want that to end, right?"

Perched on the ledge with my legs coquettishly crossed, I nodded in ladylike, giddy agreement. "It's like, once we cross that threshold, we can't go back! And right now it's all music and heartfelt confessions and sunrises and honesty. Who doesn't want to give that up?"

A slurped her beer and fixed me with her steely gimlet gaze. "And you guys haven't hooked up yet?"

I shrugged. "Nope. Not anything yet."

"So you know what you need to do," she said. A doesn't waste time with pleasantries, which is one of my favorite things about her. "At least make out with him."

Voices started chiming in along with her, "wait, you haven't made out with him? You haven't even kissed him and you're thinking about it this much already?"

"You guys," I laughed into my glass, "you sound like you're about to break into song."

Fuck.

I'm not sure how it started, but next thing I knew, my girlfriends had started singing in raggedy unison. "Shalalalalala, don't be shy, you gotta... *mumblemumblesomething* you gotta kiss de boy!" I think C busted out jazz hands, or, as close to jazz hands as one can get while holding a beer mug. I'm not sure because I was laughing so hard as I whipped my head around to see that their song and dance performance was gathering an audience. We were in a zoo, surrounded by drunks, and yet we were the ones being stared at.

They kept this up for a good minute or so, which it turns out is a really long time to have people drunkenly serenading you with repurposed Disney songs. As I tried to shush them while hiccuping and laughing, A said "of course, now when you do finally kiss him you're going to have this song stuck in your head."

"But I'm not even sure that I want to kiss the boy yet," I protested.

"Oh yes you are," she said. "You just don't want to admit it yet."

Crap. Drunk, singing, truth-telling, bullshit-cutting-through girlfriends. They'll getcha every time.

forty-eight hours

2007-08-20T03:53:00.000Z

The lamplight bouncing off the brick wall outside my den window, looking like a still frame from West Side Story. Sadie snoozing on a pile of sweaters. Being able to fit into my vintage Navy bellbottoms for the first time in four years. Faye Dunaway's hair in The Thomas Crown Affair, then walking through the National Portrait Gallery listening to Nina Simone in silent homage to the remake. Hearing about Kim's new job. Superbad and The Simpsons Movie within twenty-four hours of each other. Downloading tons of Neko Case, still drunk off her voice from Thursday's show. Playing with the macro setting on my new camera. Zucchini the size of a nightstick from the Mt. Pleasant farmer's market. My little boy's vest from a consignment shop in Austin. Crashing a stranger's birthday and agreeing to go on a date with a guy who lives on a houseboat. Oversleeping. Hiphop dance class. Feeling borderline guilty having dirty thoughts about Michael Cera, then finding out he's legal and therefore it's okay. Going to sleep with the windows open and the AC off for the first time in months.

All in all, not a bad weekend.

people you meet in grad school

2007-08-15T13:58:00.000Z

I had my final class of the summer last night and, after handing in my scary Mormon paper, had nothing to do but watch my classmates give presentations on their own papers. Some were good, most were not so much. It didn't help matters that I was in a terrible mood from a crappy day at the office, a day made crappy by grad students who simply do not hush up and do what they're told because they think they're the most brilliant person ever to grace academia, and that we should all feel grateful to catch a glimpse of the sun shining out their ass.

I spent the first hour of the presentations replaying the season premiere of The Hills on a loop in my head, but one can only muse "God, Spencer is the douchiest douche that ever douched" so many times before her brain begins to short-circuit (quick side note-- if there are any bars in the Columbia Heights/Mt. Pleasant area who would organize a weekly viewing party for this show, you'd earn my undying gratitude. Based on the amount of shame-laden GChats about The Hills that I participated in yesterday, I really think there's a market for this). I came out of my reality TV coma just in time for a presentation on Cuba that I'm pretty sure was taken verbatim from Wikipedia. And went on for FORTY MINUTES. I was ready to chew on my arm from boredom and frustration. "Really, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war? What Earth-shattering news! As graduate students in American history, surely no one here has EVER heard such a shocking interpretation of the past! Do teach us more, O Wise One!"

If you can't tell, I was deeply annoyed by this point. It's not that I hate my fellow grad students, but after seven years in academia I am so very over students who just yaaaaaapyapyap to hear themselves talk. They never bother to ask questions because they don't want to look stupid, (even though, um, we're students! people who by definition are supposed to be learning) and so instead just bleat out whatever trite trusim happens to be on their mind. I swear to God, two weeks ago a classmate of mine made the brilliant, Eisteinian statement "Well, y'know... the world revolves around money."

WOW. Fuck me sideways with your genius, friend.

After you've been in school for a while, you get to recognize stock types specific to your program and can almost immediately tell from Day One how much of a tool someone is going to be. With this in mind, I present now what will be the first in a new series here on EJ Takes Life: People You Meet in Grad School. This first PYMIGS is dedicated to the most annoying person in my most recent class, someone I wanted to irrationally hate almost from the moment I saw her, but who did not take long to actually earn my ire through basically just sucking at life.

The Unattractive Belligerent Pro-Israel Girl

This girl likely did her undergrad at Berkeley, Michigan or one of the Seven Sister Schools. If there is a single mention of Israel, the Middle East, Judaism or the Holocaust in the entire class, her face will light up and she will lurch forward in her seat, suddenly eager to share her memories of her birthright trip, even if they have nothing to do with the subject at hand. She will scowl a lot, have very frizzy hair and carry a bag make of natural fibers. Odds are high that at some point in the semester she will accuse the professor of being anti-Israel and/or equate Palestinians with terrorists.

saturday night

2007-08-13T02:23:00.000Z

I'm feeling good. No, I'm feeling damn good. The kind of good that can only come with a new haircut, paired with a new top that is just on thisside of overly trendy. The lights in the basement bar are golden and dim and I'm tossing my perfectly blown-out hair, delicately sipping champagne with my pinky slightly extended and flush with confidence and intentionally smudged eyeliner. I am woman, see me smolder.

I spot the guy across the bar and almost squawk a most unladylike laugh at his flailing limbs, spiky blonde hair and square-toed Aldo dress shoes. He could not be more of a Saturday night cliche, all gel and backslapping and Bud Light bottles. Normally this type of guy repulses me, makes me roll my eyes and want to move to another city where there are men who lie in between this type and the indie rock snob boymen that I typically gravitate towards. But tonight, after four hours of bellinis and silk wafting around me, I suddenly decide: mine. Sipping my champagne as I dance with my friends, I make a tiny bet with myself. Get him in five minutes, EJ. For fun, just because tonight, you feel like maybe being a little like a Neil LaBute femme fatale. Knowing, maybe a touch of cruel, definitely a tease.

It's ridiculously easy. A few moments of eye contact, a strategically timed dip and grind against the air, and he's right next to me, suddenly having emigrated from beside the bar. He extends his hand to me, accompanied by a smug grin as the dulcet tones of Rihanna pulse through the bar. I'm all false shyness and humility and "oh really? me?" as I hand my glass to my friend, tucking my clutch under my arm as he pulls me towards him.

He's a terrible dancer. He thinks he has good moves for a white boy as he jerks around the floor, bumping into groups of girls staring at him with bemused eyebrows raised to the heavens. The hem of his his blue striped dress shirt flops as he pulls me towards him, grabbing my hand to loop around his lanky neck. As my hand rests on the back of his neck, I feel a small rivulet of melting product trickle down the nape. Ew.

"What's your name?" he shouts in the general direction of my ear.

For a moment I consider saying what I think: You really care? Instead, I tell him my bar name. The fake name that I give to the dumb club boys I'll never see again even though they've groped my inner thigh without permission. I don't tell them my real name because it cheapens me, gives away even a tiny part of me that such transience doesn't deserve.

I don't hear his response, and I don't care. I'm already bored with him. I knew he was ridiculous from the moment I saw his moves, and his eyes are already starting to wander around the room even as his hands travel up and down my body. Nothing R-rated, but most certainly PG-13.

Suddenly I feel his hands grab my waist and throw me towards the floor in a misguided attempt at a dip. Caught off guard, I stumble in my three-inch heels and grab at his arms for dear life. He jerks me back up just as suddenly as he threw me to the floor, guffawing with buffoonish laughter as his buddies circle behind him, all "awwww, dawg!"

Trying to catch my breath after having narrowly escaped dismemberment on the dance floor, I lean in towards him. "You're a very enthusiastic dancer," I yell over the music, trying to inject as much acid as I can given the necessary volume of my voice.

"What?!" he screams back at me.

Why even bother trying to bait this guy? He's nothing I'll ever see again, no one I'm remotely interested in talking to even if circumstances would permit it. I wanted to get his attention to boost my already-soaring ego for the evening, and I got it. Case closed.

I spin away from his grasp, half dancing with him and half with my friends. I face them and roll my eyes, exaggeratedly mouthing Save me with big eyes. K grabs my hand and pulls me back into their circle, handing off my champagne glass. I take it and insert myself back into their circle, not looking back at Whatshisface.

I dance up on my friends and for a moment feel a tinge of something resembling regret. Regret that my armor is so thick, that I am so easily able to not care about a stranger, even one who in all likelihood has ungentlemanly intentions towards me and my person. Guilt that I'm proud of my ability to reel in and discard, guilt in my pride that I'm not more proper and that for tonight I'm so cocky that I don't care about being my normal, fairly decent self. Silliness for feeling that guilt because this is so not a big deal, nothing that a million people haven't done a million times before, strangers circling one another like vultures out for carrion.

And it's another night out, another nothing moment in another city under the cloud-soaked stars.

in which love tries to entertain and miserably fails

2007-08-10T16:02:00.001Z

DateLab Update: G says he's swamped at work today and won't have time to post his account of his Washington Post Datelab date until tonight or tomorrow. I think he's just tired from a long night of making his date feel beautiful. But thank you to those of you who posted your dating advice. So far as I know, G neither got smashingly drunk or attempted to slay the waiter with an axe. I, however, have done one of these on a first date before. I'll leave you to guess which one.

In other dating and relationship news, I finally got around to watching the American remake of The Last Kiss last night. It happened to be on HBO after I crawled home, thoroughly spent after my scary Mormon history presentation. In a nutshell:

- I am officially completely and totally over Zach Braff. Not only was he woefully miscast, but he clearly identifies way too much with the worst aspects of this character. Of which there are many.

- Italian people can scream and yell and throw things and it's totally okay. However, it's not okay when Americans do the exact same things in the exact same scenarios. We social scientists call that "culture."

- I still love the song "Chocolate" enough to not resent its inclusion in this film. But just barely.

- This movie made me want to crawl into bed alone and pull the covers over my head and whimper all night. Which is pretty much what happened, only with additional guilt that I was more upset and depressed by The Last Kiss than by Saving Private Ryan.

Datelab Appetizer

2007-08-09T16:14:00.000Z

Friends—in addition to not being at all recovered from Lollapalooza, I’m majorly hurting for content. Unless you really want to read all about my work, or about the Mormon historiography paper that is currently occupying every brain cell not wrapped up in work, I don’t got much for you. So here’s a guest-post from my buddy G, who has volunteered for something very cool and is willing to share his (unedited) reaction to the whole thing here on EJ Takes Life.
_____________________________________________________

Hello, there, I am EJ's friend, G. On the advice of two friends, including EJ, I signed up for the Washington Post's "Datelab." Datelab is the Post Magazine's foray into the world of dating, setting up two perfect strangers on a blind date (usually matching them by thoroughly superficial criteria), and then interviewing them the next day and the next week, and publishing the post-mortem reports. Few of these dates end as unmitigated successes, but I have seen few disasters so far. With just a little push, I signed up.

The questionnaire contained some of the normal questions (What do you do on the weekends? Are you an axe murderer?), as well as some questions for which I was unable to supply any remarkably clever answers. They seem to cherry pick which questions get published along with the couples every week, so I just hope that creative editing doesn't make me look like a total buffoon. My date is tonight at a restaurant with good reviews and an interesting menu in Bethesda, so we will see how it goes tonight. Having just exited a multi-month relationship, I haven't been single or been on a first date since January, so worst case scenario would be I get a free meal and a story out of this... unless my date says awful things about me that then get published in the Post.

I probably should have thought this through a little better.

___________________________________________________

Readers—any last-minute advice for G? Don’t forget to tune in tomorrow to get G’s report of the meal, the girl, and how it feels to converse with someone knowing she’ll be giving a reporter a ranking of your dating skills.

loh-lah-pah-LEW-sah

2007-08-07T13:37:00.000Z

I'm still not at all recovered from Lollapalooza. For one, a three day rock concert, vicious sunburn, mild to moderate auditory damage and total sleep deprivation followed by a full day of pretending to be a functional employee do not lend themselves to a quick recovery. Also, I was up until one this morning writing a paper and editing my photos. For YOU. For you GREEDY BLOG READING PEOPLE. The things I do for you, sheesh. It's totally your fault if I'm unable to focus my eyes for the rest of the day.

G. Love singing at Kidzapalooza, the kiddie tent. He does a bitchin' cover of The Elmo Song.

Craig Finn of The Hold Steady. This was easily my favorite show of the whole festival. He actually looks happy to be there, as opposed to Amy Winehouse, who surprised everyone by showing up and starting on time but spent her set looking like she'd rather be getting her teeth cleaned.

We missed most of !!! because Peter Bjorn and John had sound problems before playing "Young Folks" and Jen refused to leave. What we saw, however, was awesome.

This might be a good time to mention that we also left early on Friday and skipped Daft Punk. In retrospect, that decision slots in at #4 on EJ's Bad Life Choices List. You don't get to know the others.

Snow Patrol. You know how I love Snow Patrol, right? How "Chocolate" is the song I will forever identify with my early twenties? And how, even after Grey's Anatomy and radio overplaying and every sorority in America playing"Chasing Cars" at semiformal, I will always, always love them? Good, glad we're on the same page there.

And some token city/festival shots.

And then I find out this morning that my sister went ahead and edited all of her video, posted it on Youtube and completely outshone all of my hard work.

*WARNING: What you are about to click on is maybe the most embarrassing footage ever taken of a human being in the history of time, and yes, that includes all of From Justin to Kelly. I put it up here because I feel that as loyal readers, you deserve to know how much of a tremendous dork I truly am. I've not been shy about telling you this, but it has never been so well-illustrated until now.

Also, the reason I'm speaking like I'm in a bad community theater production of My Fair Lady is because Jen and I spent the entire weekend imitating M.I.A's accent. "Loh-la-pah-LEW-sah, wheh you aht?!" It seemed hilarious at the time, but perhaps you had to be there. Of course, now you practically will be.

Oh, and yes, I look and sound like a clown, but at least I didn't misspell "Chocolate." Nice to know that fancy college is edumacating my sister so thoroughly.

Awesome.

actual instructions i gave to a staffer today after flying back from lollapalooza this morning

2007-08-06T20:49:00.000Z

"When you get a minute, can you take these tab... divider... things? And put the sticker tab things on them? I made stickers... enough of them-- wait, what's seven times twenty-five? Just slap 'em on there."

In my defense, not ten hours before issuing said instructions I was in a field in Chicago covered in sweat and balls-out rocking to Pearl Jam. Because being twenty-five means being in that wonderful liminal stage when one stills goes to things like Lollapalooza, yet one has responsibilities awaiting her at home and is unable to take a badly, badly needed vacation day to recover from acting like a teenager when she is most clearly no longer such.

It also means that I didn't know whether to be flattered or deeply creeped out at the Muse set when a high school senior tried to pick me up with the line "I have a two-door Honda Civic."

More Lolla coming once I get some sleep. Just you wait until Jen and I upload the photos and you can check out my white girl dance moves.

the first of what will be many turkey/thanksgiving puns

2007-08-02T18:18:00.000Z

So far this year I've spent my vacation days on four family weddings, ten days in the Midwest caring for sick relatives, two family weekends in New York, and one long weekend sleeping on a deeply uncomfortable pull-out couch at the cabin. I'd say that of the total time spent with family this year, eighty percent of it was genuinely enjoyable and there was no place else I'd rather have been, fifteen percent of it has been fine in a "not at all what I'd choose but it sure is nice to see everyone happy" kind of way, four percent has been bad and one percent has been so teeth-gnashingly, hair-pulling-out hellish that I had to leave the house and drive to the parking lot of a Dairy Queen to call a friend and confirm that I was not crazy, but everyone else was.

I don't live close to any family, and there are days that I feel badly about this. A lack of geographical proximity, however, has hardly precluded the amount of time spent with them so far this year. I've spent more days with my parents than with several people I'd call close friends, a scenario that hasn't happened since I had a curfew and wore my dad's flannel shirts. And while certain members of my extended family drive me up the proverbial wall, I look at time spent with them as a necessary evil in order to spend time with the fun ones, the people I would voluntarily choose to be related to had I a real say in the matter.

As things have been piling up at work and school threatening to pull me under a sea of arcane academic snobbery, my parents started dropping hints that we would be doing Thanksgiving in the town they now live in. A place I've never been to, where I know no one, a place that is six hours from where I grew up, two hours from a major city, and where the greatest attraction is the big screen TV in my parents' basement. "Aaaaand," my mother crowed when telling me of such a cultural milestone "we have digital cable!" They way she said it made it sound like Lollapalooza would be taking place in the backyard.

This development did not excite me. Nor did further developments, chiefly the revelation that certain of those family members would be joining us. These are individuals who, admittedly, we don't see that often, but oh Lordy, when we do... it's not good. They're not nice people to begin with, but as I have acquired the reputation for being the Slut Singleton From The Big City Who Thinks She's Better Than Everyone Else (a tag, by the by, that is at most seventy percent accurate), some of these individuals take particular pride in ragging on me in a way that a casual observer might find affectionate but which everyone involved instantly recognizes as being mean-spirited and utterly without purpose, beyond trying make me feel bad about my choices. Which is basically just a bunch of big words that translate into "Aunt [Fillintheblank] is a total fucking bitch."

Last week I announced to my parents that I would not be coming home for Thanksgiving. They shocked me, in that they not only didn't yell and administer guilt trips, but that they endorsed the idea.

"Honestly, we understand," my dad said as I gawped in utter confusion on the other end of the line. "You work a lot, you're in school, you're out every night. You're a big kid; you can have a vacation where you relax and aren't always looking after other people."

But-- I had a list! I initiated that conversation only after making up a list of valid, polite reasons why instead of turkey with family, I wanted to go TO Turkey with friends. And the list of reasons didn't even include "because Aunt [Fillintheblank] is a total fucking bitch." Look at that maturity and restraint! Aren't you proud? You're not supposed to just agree to this wackadoodle plan! Don't you want to hear my reasons?!

"Honey, we said yes. Or rather, we say that you don't need our permission to not come home for Thanksgiving."

Long pause.

"Does that mean that you'll let me use Mom's frequent flyer miles to buy a ticket to Istanbul?"

Shorter pause.

"I suppose so."

Not to brag or anything, but whatever my extended family lacks in awesomeness, the immediate family completely makes up for it.

spam used to be so much more inventive

2007-07-31T16:56:00.000Z

People who I have received an e-greeting card from in the last week:

- a friend
- a school friend
- a school-mate
- a class-mate
- a lover
- a neighbour
- a church friend
- a worshipper
- a partner
- a college friend
- a child-hood friend

People who I have not received an e-greeting card from in the last week:

- a cellmate
- a deep-sea fisherman
- a bitchy girl from 9th grade English
- a Pope
- a running back for the Saskatchewan Roughriders
- a migrant farm worker
- a Pacey Witter
- a deposed Communist dictator
- a Slytherin
- a local CBS news affiliate weatherman

If this whole "career in history" thing doesn't pan out, I will have no trouble finding work as an overly imaginative spammer.

why i should not be allowed to talk to famous people

2007-07-27T04:24:00.000Z

I called Kristi as I clambered up the Metro stairs, frantically spewing apologies for my late arrival.

"Em," she cut me off, "I'm in Starbucks. Get in here right. Now."

Red-faced and sore from a day in heels and a suit, convinced Kristi was furious with my chronic tardiness, I burst into the coffee shop. "Honey!" I bellowed, trumpeting my apology, "I am so sorry I'm late! I know we said 6:45 but I missed three trains in a row and-"

As I bent down to hug her hello, she elbowed me in my ribs. Being a natural master of intuition and subtle signals, I totally ignored it. "-and I'm just so, like, GLAD to be out of the conference for the day, and I had to go to the dermatologist and I don't have SKIN CANCER, but GOD, it's always something, you know? So how ARE YOU? Welcome back from EUROPE! I want to hear all about your TRIP and the HOT GUY FROM THE BEACH IN NICE!"

I am cringing so very hard as I type these words in capitals, because I know it's how I sounded, all boomy and braying in comparison to the silent signals she was so desperately trying to send. As Kristi's eyes bugged out of her head and I loudly asked her where she'd like to DO DINNER, I noticed someone familiar-looking standing by the condiment station.

And the stupid thing is, I knew right away it was him. And her. Them. The people that we had seen onscreen within the last month and were planning on seeing onstage in about four hours. It was obviously them, and more specifically, him. The man who we had watched and who had me leaving the theater convinced of his utter perfection as a singer, songwriter, man- nay, human being. And you think I exaggerate, but not a single woman I know who has seen Once has escaped without falling for Glen Hansard.

So even though I knew it was him, and them, I continued to steal not-at-all sneaky looks at them as they fixed their coffees and I babbled about something, just to give my face something to do besides full-on gawp. This lasted for probably all of fifteen seconds, but it felt like fifteen minutes as I mentally ran through the protocol for such an encounter. Should be cool and ignore them, like, "*sigh* another celebrity in my Starbucks?" Should I tell them I think they're fantastic? Should I ask them how they like DC, and if they have time they should really visit the Spy Museum? (No, that's toolish; maybe not exactly in those words; you are such a loser for even thinking it.)

I legitimately understand that it would be annoying to be "on" all the time, and though I find it deeply stupid when famous people appear on Dateline or similar to beg for their privacy, it's understandable that they get annoyed when they have to smile and be all friendly to strangers when they're just trying to order a nonfat cappucino. But from a totally selfish standpoint, how often does one suddenly encounter the person whose voice was just playing on their iPod not five minutes before?

With all these thoughts coursing through my head, I suddenly noticed that they were heading out the door and my moment to react was now or never. "Excuse me," I asked and he turned around and smiled. Oh, that lovely crinkly grin. I grinned back at him and at her, and suddenly, in one horrible moment I realized: I have no idea how to pronounce Markéta Irglová's name.

Faced with the awkward possibility of having to ask someone how to pronounce her first name before telling her I loved her music, I chose the WASP way out and ignored the problem. "Are you Glen Hansard?" I asked him, knowing, duh, he was. I smiled at both of them, as if to communicate "I know who you are too! I do! I swear!"

"Aye, that's me," he replied as friendly as could possibly be. He seemed like just an impossibly nice guy, and utterly un-indie snobbish. I may have swooned as I said "I'm sorry, I don't want to bother you all; just wanted to say that we're really looking forward to the show tonight."

He was paused in his tracks at the door, half-turned around to face me and Kristi, and as I spoke for a moment he rocked forward as if to walk back to us. "Aw thanks, we really appreciate it," he smiled back at me, and then remained standing there as if receptive to talking more. Receptive to conversation. Glen Hansard is standing in front of me responding to something I said and his body language indicates he would be fine with continuing the conversation.

And for the first time in my entire life, I have absolutely nothing to say. I am utterly without speech, or even thoughts that could potentially be vocalized. There is not a single topic of even loser-ish, Spy Museum-related thought in my empty little head. We all stood there awkwardly frozen for a moment, a voice inside me screaming "say something! Say anything at all! This does not happen! You do not meet men on your List of Five Celebrities in a coffee shop! You're practically in a Friends episode! Say you're in a Friends episode! Say anything! Oh my God, this is the longest that anyone has ever NOT TALKED TO ANOTHER PERSON."

What happened next later became a topic of debate between Kristi and me. She swears it was she who then said "break a leg," and that I echoed her. I contend it was entirely the other way around. The only thing we agreed on over dinner at Creme, while endlessly replaying and dissecting the entire exchange, is that the only thing lamer than the person who says "break a leg" to a rock star before his show is the person who repeats it a moment later.

The show was fantastic, especially their cover of "Into The Mystic" and Markéta Irglová's rendition of "If You Want Me," and I very much hope that they enjoyed themselves as much as they seemed to, that they know how much the crowd enjoyed themselves, and that when I said "break a leg" to Glen Hansard in the Starbucks on 13th and U, I really meant to say "how would you like to make tender, passionate love all night and then talk marriage and babies?"

Because I could really go for that. In a totally chill, has-it-together kind of nonchalant way, of course.

because i am clearly now going to get around to posting actual content any time soon

2007-07-24T09:19:00.000Z

1. I can sing the entirety of both alto and soprano parts of Carmina Burana from memory in both German and Latin. I can also do big chunks of Mozart's Requiem and Handel's Messiah. This sounds kind of impressive to the layperson, but anyone who at all knows choral music and is reading this is totally thinking "big whoop." Still, I'm kind of proud of it, even though it practically never gets me laid.

2. Every once in a while I peruse the admissions websites for MFA programs in acting. Not that I'll ever apply, but it does me good, knowing that I could at least technically fulfill the admission requirements.

3. I have terrible teeth. I mean, they look great but are secretly, really terrible. I mean, my four front teeth are actually elaborate permanent crowns because my childhood dentist said that if I didn't replace them with falsies, they would probably fall out before I finished grad school. Yay, bad genes!
3a. When I got these fake teeth put in I happened to be in the throes of an undiagnosed kidney infection, and spent the entire (un-anesthetized) procedure thrashing about in unbelievable pain and discomfort from multiple parts of my poor body. I now have a pathological fear of all things dentist, second only to my irrational fear of sharks.

4. My maternal grandmother came down with severe Alzheimer's in her early 50s and even though I was twelve when she died, I never knew her. My mom, her daughter, is now 55. I'm scared it runs in the family, and think about this every time I have to repeat myself to her.

5. When someone says that something "made [me] grow as a person," I want to tear out chunks of my hair from annoyance. A person? Really? As opposed to what, a fungus? This phrase is the reason, more than the drunken threeways or the fact that I'm at least nominally an adult now, why I don't watch The Real World anymore.

6. I haven't decided whether to keep my name if I get married or give it to any kids I may have, and my reasons both ways have nothing to do with feminism. On the one hand, I really don't like my last name. It's an unsonorous noun that easily lends itself to sex jokes, and, well, I just don't like the sound of it. On the other hand, my dad's side of the family has not done well in preserving it. My only male cousin on that side changed his last name for a variety of reasons I won't go into, and my other female cousins already have changed their names or have distanced themselves far enough from the family that they would never pass it on to their kids. So basically, it could die out in my generation. For all the mistakes that side of the family has made over the decades, I don't know if I can let that happen on my watch.

7. I currently have twenty-six mosquito bites on my legs. I itch. Stupid outdoor wedding receptions.

8. I alphabetize all my DVDs and VHS tapes. Oh, and I still own VHS tapes. That's weird, right?

harry potter and the evening of navel-gazing

2007-07-21T04:46:00.000Z

As I sit in my apartment, curled on my brown mod armless couch with my feet nestled in the folds of my mon expensive rug and tea candles flickering about my living room, reflecting the gold and brown cover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I feel the urge to document how I feel at this moment.

I first read a Harry Potter book when I was 18, the summer before I started college. I was working for an independent bookstore owned by a lovely, slightly dotty British woman who upon hearing I had never read any of the books insisted that I do so, on pain of firing. The fourth book was to come out that July, and she would be damned if she would have a seller who had never read the books representing her store on this most critical of nights for the publishing industry.

I vividly remember sitting in the driver's seat of my 1998 Cougar in the backlot of the strip mall where her bookstore was tucked, flipping open the front cover of the first book and finding myself almost instantly sucked in, so much so that she had to come looking for me some time later, concerned because my break had been over for quite a while. I remember drawing lightning bolts onto little boys' foreheads the night that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out, tracing a zigzag of purple eyeliner under their bowl cuts as I quietly mourned the death of Cedric Diggory, a death I had read about earlier that night in our stocking room over pizza and cheap red wine with Aaron the Perpetual College Student who at 28 was still working on his bachelor's in liberal studies.

I don't remember acquiring book 5, but I do remember acquiring book 6, and would like to take this opportunity to apologize to my ex, who I know reads this blog, for inviting him to visit my family cabin and then completely ignoring him so that I could buy and read Harry Potter. Terribly rude of me, thousand apologies, etcetera. Revisionist historians might even contribute such behavior as a cause for him breaking up with me a week afterwards, but, water under the bridge.

Such bad behavior aside, my even worse behavior as regards Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was to flip. I skipped to the end of the book almost the moment it was in my hot little hands, and discovered the big climax before I knew the context for it. I chuckled as my sister, who, though she is five years younger is light-years ahead when it comes to self-restraint, gasped and gawped when she sloooooowly made her way to the conclusion I'd abrasively and abruptly arrived at.

And when she got there, I envied her. Not enough to make me regret flipping, mind you, but enough that two years later I still recall that envy, and a tangible sense of having given up to get. Enough so that this time around I have gone out of my way to avoid any spoilers, hints, whispers, comments as to what happens, even avoiding my usual navel-gazing articles on pop culture and social memory constructs in Slate, Salon, the NYT or similar.

I am not good at self-denial. I am quite terrible at it, if you want to get down to the nitty gritty of it. Yet I'm smart enough to understand that this is as a result of living a pretty privileged life and not having to deny myself of something if I don't want to. Not of material possessions, mind you-- I'm not rich, and given my professional choices, I never will be-- but I've always had the freedom to pursue lifestyle choices, hobbies, habits, even ways to fill my days, without an overabundance of self-denial.

But this Harry Potter is incontravertably the last book of its ilk. The last chapter in something I've enjoyed and felt invested in for eight years, beginning when I was a pale imitation of the person I am now. Trite as it sounds, these books are a link to childhood, and the sheer joy I've felt this week in anticipating holding this book, in finding out how it all ends, has felt unmistakably childlike. There is no irony, no agenda, no emotion besides glee tinged with melancholy that it has to end.

And so I sit, Harry's final saga resting in gold binding on my coffee table. MY COFFEE TABLE. Since I began this journey with Harry, I've become a person who drinks coffee. And who owns furniture to put it on. Who pays a mortgage, who has a 401K, who has regrets and messiness and has reconciled herself to hard truths and still, looking at even the table of contents, revels in a childish sense of wonder and excitement. And is so grateful that this world exists for her to enjoy.

And now that I have learned how exquisite self-denial can be, how reluctant I find myself to surrender to the end of it all.

conversations with myself

2007-07-19T15:41:00.000Z

Psssst.
Hello?
Hey EJ. It's me, your inner voice. She Who Knows Better, She Who Speaks Uncomfortable Truths.
Oh, you again. Do you mind? It's one in the morning and I'm trying to study.
Yeah, I know. I just thought I'd pop in and give you a hard time about not being able to retain this stuff.
Thanks, that's very helpful.
No, really, you're bad at it. You say you love history but you can't remember the name of the Smithsonian curator the damn chapter is about, even though you've probably read it ten times in the last few pages.
That's not really the point. I'm a grad student. It's not about memorizing facts. If I understand the argument that is being made and can critique it in a sophisticated manner, or at least one that uses a lot of five-dollar words, I'm golden.
Riiiight. So you're not at all bothered by the fact that you can't remember his name, or the names or anyone else involved in the controversy, or the lobbying associations involved, but you're totally fine with the rest of the junk that's clogging up your head.
What are you talking about?
Don't you find it really troubling that you can't retain the details of what is supposed to be your academic passion, but you remember totally useless crap without even trying? Aren't you totally embarrassed that you know that Lindsay Lohan has left rehab and is wearing an alcohol-monitoring anklet? And how you know the names of Britney Spears' dogs? And--
I do not know the names of Britney Spears' dogs.
Yes you do. Don't lie.
Shut up. Look, I read that crap in little minute-long spurts throughout the day. It's not my fault it sticks in my head. I don't want it to stick in my head. If I could physically reach in and remove it from my brain with a teeny-tiny ice cream scoop, I'd do it. I want to have the brain space for stuff that actually matters.
Maybe if Perez Hilton wrote about the October Revolution and drew coke residue on a photo of Lenin you'd actually have been able to contribute in class on Tuesday.
MAYBE. Look, I guess I just process information differently. I blame the Internet. And society. And being raised by a generation that was too busy congratulating themselves on being good people to effectively parent their children. And saturated fats.
Maybe you should stop reading Salon.com all damn day.
Maybe you should bite me.
I can't. I'm your inner monologue.
Fine, then maybe you could shut up so I could get some sleep. Trying to read historiography in bed is clearly not working.
Suit yourself.
...
...
...
Bit-Bit, Lacy and London.
I hate you.

ferg-breath gets lucky

2007-07-17T21:38:00.000Z

No real writing for a while-- work is nuts and I'm spending every free moment reading historical memory theory. Grad school is super-great, y'all! Like a job, but a whole extra one, and you pay money to work at it!

Here's a little something from your friend EJ. If you watched a thimbleful of the Nickelodeon I watched in the late 80s/early 90s, expect to spend the rest of the day giggling:

extraordinary how potent cheap music is

2007-07-15T16:21:00.001Z

Holy... wow. I need to update my Top 5 All Time Concerts.

Previously, the list was:

1) The Who, V Festival 2006. Because it's the fricking' WHO, because they played for almost two hours and because they played a forty minute medley from Tommy. Also because there was insane drama going on that day: in our group people were kissing and not speaking and coming down from coke binges and it was all incredibly messy and bad and it all just stopped the second the band began the opening to "Baba O'Reilly."

2) The Killers, Vienna (Austria, not Virginia), February 2005. Because the show was in an abandoned industrial slaughterhouse, because it was just before Hot Fuss really broke out, and because I will never, ever forget, that particular performance of "Mr. Brightside." I was 23 and backpacking through Europe after quitting the worst first job ever and cheesy as it seems now, because it's a song about creepy voyeurism and stalking, those lyrics seemed to have been written exactly for me:

But it's just the price I pay
Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
'Cause I'm Mr. Brightside

My original next three were Ben Folds at Interlochen Arts Camp, Summer 2003 (got sick of the crappy piano they gave him, so he stood on top of it and sang "Not The Same" while conducting the audience in six-part harmony); Arcade Fire in Amsterdam, March 2005 (this had the potential to be much higher on the list, but frankly, I don't remember much of it) and Barenaked Ladies, Detroit, summer of 1998 (first big Detroit concert I ever saw with friends, first time I ever made out with a stranger at a concert, and sadly the first and only time I ever saw BNL. Say what you will, but they put on a fantastic show and I would cheerfully pay any amount of money to have them as my wedding band someday. How awesome a party would THAT be?).

However, the list needs updating. Last night Lisa and I saw the Decemberists with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and it is immediately going on my list as #3. I knew it was going to be good, and that I was there with the right person (a critical element of a successful concert-going experience, as the wrong companion can wreck what is otherwise an awesome show) when the orchestra started to tune up and Lisa and I looked at each other all moony-eyed. We're both former classical musicians and that familiar A note wafting over the seats and onto the lawn felt like a welcoming beacon, a sign that whatever was about to happen was promised respectability and a place in the canon.

The band came on to crashing applause, Colin Meloy opened his mouth to sing "Crane Wife 1 & 2" and we were done for. The combination of the two groups was glorious, creating the most lush sounds I've ever heard in a rock concert. The strings starting to pulse behind his guitar, the brass dartingly punctuating the percussion, and of course, Colin Meloy's voice presided firmly yet yearningly over all of it. They created a wave of gorgeous sound that spread over the lawn, so rich that the air seemed to massage us as we soaked up the music.

The Decemberists of course pride themselves on being inventive and using a huge variety of instruments to create lush and unusual music, especially for a rock band. You think the Decemberists, you think creativity, literary lyrics, innovative, even snobby. But with the backing of a full orchestra, what we got was JOY. Their music, even songs like "Odalisque," seemed to shimmer with optimism and eager, excited smiles. One of my favorite moments was during "The Tain," when the cameraman caught a violinist giggling to herself as Colin Meloy sang "she's a salty little pisser with your cock in her kisser," and it was just one of many moments when the band members, orchestra members and conductor were caught off-guard smiling and laughing, as if thinking "how incredibly cool is this?" It was what music should be, with musicians clearly taking pride in what they do and having a great time sharing it with an enthusiastic audience.

Of course, it was an audience made in part of classical music fans, and so people remained sitting until the orchestra took a break and the band played "Perfect Crime # 2" without them. As the audience rose, Meloy jumped off the stage and strolled around the pit, while Lisa and I clutched each other's arms in silent prayer. "Pleaselethimcomebackhere, pleaselethimcomeback here...." And it worked. He appeared at the top of the house, twenty feet from where we stood, and we both ran for it, leaving our purses and wallets and cameras behind on the blanket. Because good music does something to the listener, makes her forget herself and her concerns and the worldly distractions, and makes her run after a small man in a white suit and round glasses just to high-five him, in the hopes of gaining even more sensation from all that he has already given her.

By the end of the night, my cheeks hurt from grinning so hard and I was in an absolute daze. Just the way I always want to feel after a show. Or, y'know, life. Whichever. If I could change one thing (because there's always something), I wish they would have brought out the whale for the encore performance of "Mariner's Revenge." But since "seeing the Decemberists perform 'Mariner's Revenge'" has been on my Things To Do Before I Die List for some time now, let's just go ahead and leave that particular nit un-picked for now.

Complete setlist:

The Crane Wife 1 & 2
The Infanta
We Both Go Down Together
The Bagman's Gambit (which of course got big cheers from the hometown crowd)
Odalisque
Perfect Crime #3 (without orchestra)
Los Angeles, I'm Yours
The Tain
O, Valencia! (without orchestra)
I Was Meant For The Stage

Encore:
The Mariner's Revenge (without orchestra)

hold me closer, tony danza

2007-07-11T17:11:00.000Z

There was a show on MTV in the mid-90s that was called something like X-Treme Karaoke, or So You Think You Know The Lyrics But You Really Don't, Dumbass. I could probably Wikipedia it, but where's the fun in that? Anyhoo, my only recollections of it are that it was hosted by one of the more rotund male veejays and people sang popular songs without the lyrics in front of them and the audience laughed at their boneheaded attempts. Oh, and that I would never, ever go on it in a million years.

Because, you see, I am notorious for misunderstanding song lyrics, singing along to a song only to mangle innocent words into something completely unrelated and entirely stupid. Something that a person with common sense, an attribute I rather noticeably lack, inevitably notices, forcing them to burst my bubble and say things like "I'm pretty sure Alanis Morrisette was not singing about a cross-eyed bear."

It wasn't until I was reading the New York Times review of Xanadu: The Musical (don't say a word; I assure you that no one is judging me more harshly than me right now), that I realized I've heard the lyric wrong for all this years:

I always thought it was "med-ie-val woman!" and not "e-e-vil woman!"

Of course, my way is more amusing. The thought of Electric Light Orchestra writing a disco number about a 13th century European peasant matron is way more fun than just another song about just another bitch. And, given the substances that the members of Electric Light Orchestra likely had coursing through their bloodstreams circa 1975, would anyone have really been surprised if they wrote a song about a Medieval Woman? Would this be so shocking when compared what other 1970s artists were singing?

I know I'm not alone in this quirk. What's the most ridiculous song lyric that you've misheard and sung incorrectly, blissfully unaware until someone pointed out that you were very wrong, and maybe should get your ears checked?

2007-07-09T17:35:00.000Z

For someone who claims to love travel as much as I do, someone who subscribes to both Conde Nast Traveler and National Geographic Traveler, someone who planned and ultimately scrapped trips to both Croatia and North Korea this year (oh, did I not mention that I was seriously considering vacationing in North Korea? And that I am mildly to moderately deranged?), I don't actually do a lot of traveling.

The problem, if you care to think of it that way, is a certain cabin in upstate Michigan. It's where I spend Christmas and a chunk of the summer, and my time there plus the odd three-day weekend completely eats up my precious vacation days. It's so hard to initiate the effort of finding a destination, travel companions, a hotel that is both affordable and not crawling with roaches and scam artists eager to pray on American tourists, scouting fun destinations once there and generally pulling the whole damn thing off when going to the cabin is comparatively easy. It's six hours door to door. Five minutes after I walk in I'm sacked out on the couch with a margarita in hand, staring at the lake and relaxing with such gusto that I risk drowning in the sofa cushions.

I mean, look:

If you knew you would wake up to sunrises like that every single day while staying there for free, well, wouldn't you also be a bit reluctant to branch out?

If I'm completely honest with myself, it's not just the scenery and the cost that keep me going up north. Nor is it just the family, although that is a pretty big part of it, since it's pretty much what we call "home" these days. It's not just the whitefish pate at Art's Tavern or the surprisingly excellent shopping, or even Wes, the adorable bartender on our tall mast bay cruise who was a real-life Pacey Witter.

Sorry. Need minute to recover. Thinking about Pacey Witter-esque sailor and his stories of battling pirates in the South Pacific...

Ahem. Anyways.

No, it's not just these things, wonderful as they are. It's the fact that I can kick back and do absolutely nothing. That I can revert to being a bratty teenager who eats pizza for breakfast and is all "Moo-ooooom!" when the parents remove my Arcade Fire CD to play some John Gorka. I nestle in the couch with a drink and read bad fiction when my family is annoying. My sister and I, who normally get along pretty well as adults, start picking at one another as I get bossy and she gets spacey. Being up there, I revert to my adolescent self in ways good and bad.

Every time I go up north a part of me wants to stay. It thinks "I could get a job at the local newspaper and live on 20 grand a year and go to the beach or ski every weekend!" I manage to squish that part pretty quickly because I tried it for one summer in college and was out of my mind within two weeks. Going to country bars with three-dollar pitchers of Bud was fun for about three days, and then I started to get annoyed when bartenders kept putting Sprite in my vodka gimlets. Everyone is white. And you may not believe this, but the woods are quiet. I mean, really QUIET. The kind of quiet where if you're alone too long you start thinking about In Cold Blood and even the dopey aliens from Signs, who, let's face it, would seem fairly menacing if you were all alone in the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. And I wouldn't even have Mel Gibson around to protect/distract me by making anti-Semitic comments!

I'm not sure entirely where I lost my train of thought just now. Point is, I couldn't live there. Not yet. It's getting more feasible-- Meijer's carries wasabi peas now, and when I drove to the beach to take photos of the sunset, the local rock station played Blonde Redhead. This is a major leap for a station that until a year ago required one song an hour to be Christian power pop. But still, I'm not quite ready to sign up for year-round up north living. I revert to acting like a teenager because northern Michigan doesn't allow for the extended adolescence everyone in DC relishes, some people well past its expiration date. Here, it's almost effortless for someone to be a powerbroker by day (or at least labor under the delusion that they are one) and a kid as soon as they leave the office. Adults play kickball and drink too much, blow money on expensive dinners and toys they don't need and stay unpartnered well after their peers back home have shacked up and started the next generation of Midwesterners.

There, there are clear delineations of adult and not-adult. And painful as it is to admit, I wouldn't do well in a place that required me to actually be a grownup.

Vacations, however, I don't see stopping any time soon.

*Sigh.* I miss it already.

keeping austin weird

2007-07-02T13:16:00.000Z

Oh dear. I am in a bit of a pickle.

You see, I've fallen in love. With Austin, Texas.

Friends, I swear, from the moment I stepped out of my rental Jeep and onto Guadalupe, I was done for. This town has it all. Everyone knows that Austin revolves around great live music and great food (we ate nothing but Mexican and barbecue for three days straight, including breakfasts), but I had no idea that the quality of day-to-day life could be so friendly, so contented, so-- and yes, I technically was, but everyone else from the students to the shopgirls to my cousins seemed to feel this way too-- perpetually like being on vacation.

Strangers were friendly when they didn't have to be. I can't tell you how many conversations I had with total strangers. "And what brings you to Austin, honey?" they asked at the vintage store, the hole-in-the-wall with amazing pork and roasted pineapple tacos, hell, even the gas station. "Oh, I'm here for a cousin's wedding." "Oh how great! Is the bride excited? Where's the ceremony? Are y'all going to see the bats after the reception? Do y'all need directions to Salt Lick?"

That's another thing about Austin: people are excited to show off their town. They're proud of what they have and how they live, and are welcoming to strangers. After seven years of DC hostility to tourists, defensiveness and constant superiority complexes vis-a-vis Northwest vs. Southeast vs. northern Virginia, it was incredibly refreshing to be in a town when everyone, rich and not-so-rich, was clearly proud to live where they did. This is a city that takes great care of itself. It's unfailingly clean, has terrific signage on the most ordinary businesses and people are forever out and about on the streets. I didn't see a single dead zone, a neighborhood I wouldn't adore living in or a street I'd be afraid to walk down alone at night.

Also, Austin is cheap. I nearly wept when I bought a throw pillow for seven dollars and a taco for a buck fifty. Of course my new cowboy boots were a bit pricier (ahem), but how often does one get the chance to buy handmade Texas cowboy boots (you wouldn't believe how much the ones with the snake's head on the toe cost)? Boots aside, everything is insanely affordable. Driving down South Congress to get my boots I heard a radio announcer talking about a condo development opening down the street "with two-bedrooms starting in the low $180s!" Believe me when I say that the willpower I employed in not driving over and signing a contract right then was superhuman.

Oh, and did I mention that the landscape is beautiful and hilly and full of trees and not at all the desolate desert I had envisioned? And that everything is at most a 15 minute drive away from downtown? And that UT is an amazing campus full of fountains and perfect lawns and Spanish architecture and that I will now be perusing their HR website with a vengeance? And that there everyone seems to be not only happy with life, but ridiculously healthy and good-looking? And that I have family there, family whose wedding I attended and will have to write about in another post because it was a perfect ceremony and perfect reception (exactly what I want if I ever take that particular step) and that they live a perfect life that I covet, full of books and bluegrass and porches and elaborate adventures in cooking and frequent trips to Mexico and Montana?

Because I've spent my entire adult life in DC and my most frequent weekend destination is New York, it's never occurred to me that daily life could be lived in a place where people weren't perpetually bitching about something or other. That life could be like vacation every day, that a job could be just a means to living a satisfying life and not a trial to be endured in the name of some abstract greater power. It's silly to say that a three-day vacation makes me want to pack it in and quit DC, because, of course, I am more sensible than that. I mean, I just bought a condo and got into grad school. I'm not going anywhere... for another eighteen months, at least.

But know that I am thinking... about things. And let's just say that I could see myself very, very happy in Austin.

cranky mcbitchface goes jogging

2007-06-27T13:00:00.001Z

As predicted... awkward email in my inbox this morning from the latest Disappearing Act. Man, do I know how to pick 'em and call 'em.

I hope you'll forgive my bad mood. It's 8:45 am as I type this and I've already been awake for three hours. "Why?" you ask, because you are a smart person and are very confused by the World Champion of Sleeping In, Hater of All Things Early, voluntarily waking up at such an ungodly hour.

Because I was running. At 6 am, I was running to beat the heat. This is the second day in a row I've done my early morning runs and I've not yet trained myself to go to bed corresponding early. So right now I'm operating on my second day of five hours' sleep. You'll forgive me if I'm Cranky McBitchface today.

You see, a while ago I got a bunch of pictures back from the first round of summer parties and weddings, and also recently spent a Sunday tubing on the Potomac with some of the most beautiful, skinny and brilliant people in Washington. Ergo, I am not feeling so great about my looks these days. I can't do much about my propensity for Paris Hilton wonk-eye in photos, but the extra layer of winter padding around my thighs? My Buddha belly, which is moving from kind of endearing to kind of "not making me able to wear my favorite jeans?" Yup, I can do something about that.

I let my gym membership lapse because I hate waiting for the treadmill with 18 year olds in full makeup and booty shorts and since then my workout routine has actually improved. In normal weather I run once or twice a week in the evenings, lift weights and do crunches while watching bad TV and, most importantly, don industrial strength Spanxx. However, the arrival of summer in the fetid swamp that is our nation's capital makes the first and the last of these things extremely difficult. I don't do well in heat. I mean, I really don't do well in heat. I break out in hives if I'm in the sun for more than an hour, my face gets bright red and stays that way long after I've moved indoors, and I glow in a most un-ladylike manner.

So I've started taking hip hop dance classes, which have helped my endurance a lot and are a lot more fun of a workout than jogging down 16th Street (sadly, they haven't helped my moves. Despite my teacher's best efforts, I remain a very, very Caucasian dancer). At ten bucks a lesson and all in the evenings, though, I need to find something else, and that something else has become early morning running.

This morning as I gasped uphill past Meridian Hill Park, an unpleasant thought entered my head. "You'd probably have to run less," something whispered "if you gave up your morning cake donut with your coffee. That thing has 12 grams of fat in it."

Of course, I chuckled to myself and picked up the pace. No way that is going to happen any time soon. After all, Cranky McBitchface needs her carbs.

everything's bigger in texas (except my vacation plans)

2007-06-26T16:12:00.000Z

Interweb people, I need your help. I will be in Austin for (yet another) wedding this weekend and am looking for some fun things to do in my too-short time there. Austinist has been a big help, but you lovely people are so very smart and well-traveled I'm sure you have your own suggestions. I'll have about four hours to myself on Friday afternoon and will then be with my dad and his brother from through the Saturday evening wedding until our respective flights home Sunday afternoon. Specifically, I'm looking for recommendations for:

- Barbecue

- Live music, preferably some really excellent country and honky-tonk stuff. My family takes bluegrass very seriously, if that helps you at all. I already checked Stubbs' website and sadly no one is playing while we're in town.

- Unusual museums. I enjoy a good traditional museum as much as the next gal, but am still regretting that while in Wichita last weekend we chose the art museum instead of the Hopalong Cassidy Museum.

- Any farmers markets, shopping districts, excellent antique marts

- A place to buy cowboy boots

Please, please leave any suggestions and recommendation in the comments section!

sometimes a girl just needs one

2007-06-25T14:06:00.000Z

I usually don't write about guys and dating in this space. This is for a variety of reasons:

1. There's not a lot to write about. I live in DC, am tall and won't date bisexual men, conservative Republicans or guys who cite The Da Vinci Code as their favorite book. This dramatically limits my options.

2. When there is something to write about, I prefer to keep it to myself for a while. That way, if we wind up actually dating, I won't be forced into a conversation that begins "Hey, I write about my feelings on the Internet. Oh, and I published stories about you there, too."

3. I repeat the exact same pattern over and over and over.

Let's explore # 3, shall we?

In the last year, I've repeated the same relationship three times. The guy is always older than me, of the indie rock persuasion, in a sell-out job he hates and is a little bad at life but not so much so that it's a major red flag (31 and sleeps on a futon, 35 and still goes home to do laundry). We date for a couple of weeks, agree we both hate Dane Cook and are rapidly losing affection for Zach Braff, introduce one another to our favorite movies and songs, hook up a few times... and he completely disappears.

THEN, within two months of the last encounter, he reappears full of dramatic apologies and self-hating prose, completely disproportional to the amount of time we've been dating. These emails, phone calls, text messages and online friendship network requests have all contained at least two of the following phrases:

- "I can't believe how I blew it with you."
- "You are the coolest girl I've met in a long time."
- "I'm dating someone else now so I'm not doing this just to get in your pants."
- "The way I treated you is my biggest regret."
- "Please forgive me. I hope we can still be friends."
- "Are we still going to that concert?"
- "Can I come over?"

My response to all of this has of course been to completely ignore it. Because when you blow me off, especially after we've slept together, you don't get the reward of my friendship or even me acknowledging your continued existence. Internally, I've been terribly jolly whenever I get one of these crawling-back contacts. It may not be as great as actually continuing a relationship, but knowing that you're still thinking about me long after I've stopped thinking about you... not gonna lie, kind of validating.

However, when the latest Disappearing Act resurfaced at 2:30 last Saturday morning, it stopped being validating and started being a little fucking annoying. This was partly because I was in Wichita, sharing a hotel room with my entire family, and one does not generally enjoy receiving drunk dials when one's father is in the room . But mostly, it was annoying because I knew exactly what was going to transpire the second I saw his name on my caller ID. He would chicken out and not leave a voicemail. Then he would call back later, sober, to try to explain why he called before. I would not answer this call either and he would leave a stammering voicemail full of apologies for both bootycalling me and for dropping out of contact last month. And sure enough, this is exactly what happened. If tradition continues, I fully expect an awkward follow-up email within a week.

This is not a pattern I'm particularly enjoying, and yet, given the less-appealing options of celibacy or dating college-age Republican Hill interns, it's what I have going for me at the moment. There have been other options in the last few months, perfectly nice guys with whom I share little chemistry and banter, guys who are very good about keeping in contact, but I'm a spark junkie. That such sparkage seems to be irrevocably linked with guys who can't handle it and run away is frustrating, but I'd much rather be single than desperately trying to cultivate attraction when none is manifesting naturally.

And, on a somewhat related yet semi-random note, there is no horror quite like the horror of talking with a nice guy at a wedding, doing shots and comparing favorite bands and asking him how he knows the bride and groom and realizing that this guy hitting on you, doing the elbow-stroking thing to move in a little closer, IS A COUSIN. Way to make drunken apology texting from DC man-boys seem terribly appealing.

the very anti-climactic story of how i almost threw down in a kennedy center bathroom

2007-06-20T15:48:00.000Z

Cracking up over something, the details of which I now cannot recall and were probably terribly silly, Lisa and I took our places in the ever-growing wait for the Kennedy Center's garage-level restroom. As I leaned against the wall, exhausted from the crowds of reggae fans dancing above our heads and the stifling humidity pressing down on all of us, I accidentally nudged the arm of the woman standing next to me with my huge black Kenneth Cole tote. If you've ever spent time with me, chances are good you've met this bag. I bump into a lot of things with it, because I am klutzy and it is massive.

"Excuse (hic!) me!" I snorted, trying to apologize to the stranger around an unfortunately-timed burst of hiccups brought on by laughter and the Sam Adams Summer Ale I'd consumed a half-hour earlier. Still giggling, I started to rummage through my bag looking for my lip gloss when:

"I think someone has had a few too many drinks, because someone keeps invading my personal space!"

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about me. Hands still buried in my tote I looked up to see the woman I'd bumped into starting to gesture wildly from on high, as if conducting an invisible symphony of Woe. Looking past Lisa and me to the row of women snaking through the open Ladies Room door and into the hallway, she was clearly performing for an audience.

"This," she exclaimed as she wildly gesticulated, drawing a three-by-three foot box in the air around her person , "is my personal space. It is my zone. No one should enter it unless I specifically invite them too. Especially not drunk white girls. But what can you do when a drunk girl decides to get all up in your space?" She gestured to the bathroom ceiling with the kind of shrug that is both impassioned and downtrodden, the kind often made by Jewish mother types in Woody Allen movies. It was a gesture that seemed to say "no one will ever know how much I suffer, but this action might convey a smidgen of what I endure."

The other women in line were by this point staring at the walls or floor to avoid making eye contact with Personal Space, and both Lisa's and my mouths were hanging wide open as we looked at one another in total confusion. "Is she really talking about you IN FRONT OF YOU?" Lisa's eyes seemed to be asking.

"I don't know!" my eyes silently exclaimed in response. "Did that bitch really just call me a drunk? Why is she all rowdy about her space? What is she trying to accomplish with this? Are we going to rumble in a Kennedy Center bathroom?" It was a surreal moment, and felt like the first time I smoked out of an apple bong and spent the evening touching my friend Jason's nose and asking him "Are we really here? Is this really happening???"

As Personal Space continued her speech, the line continued to awkwardly shuffle towards the stalls. She finally concluded her speech with a dramatic flourish as the door to the handicapped stall opened, pausing for a moment before she swept into the toilet as if expecting the other women in line to break out in applause, or a perhaps a chorus of "Oh Happy Day!" With no adulation forthcoming she swept into the stall, bumping my own arm with her hemp duffle bag.

Lisa and I stood there for a moment, utterly unsure if what we thought had just happened had actually just happened. A woman came out of another stall and I entered it, shaking my head at the absurdity of the last few moments when Lisa called out behind me:

"EJ, honey, did I step on your foot? I'm sooooooo sorry!"

Without even thinking, I threw open the stall door and in my best Exorcist voice growled:

"YOU BITCH. THAT WAS MY PERSONAL SPACE."

I went about my business to the sounds of fifteen women hooting with laughter.

Personal Space was bent over at the sink washing her hands when I exited the stall, the other women in line still chuckling. She glowered at me as I washed my own hands, then continued to glower as we both walked over to the paper towel dispenser at the same time. We stood in front of it together, frozen for a moment in time; self-righteous lecturer and smartass, tipsy taunter locked in a battle of wills for the right to dry our hands. I blinked first, but only so I could goad her further by dripping with sarcasm and calling her old:

"After you. MA'AM.

And that is the very anti-climactic story of how I almost threw down in a Kennedy Center bathroom.

the four beer blues

2007-06-18T14:11:00.000Z

Sitting in the basement of an old haunt, I felt the familiar tug of the Four Beer Blues.

You know what I'm talking about. That sudden sweep of melancholy that hits out of nowhere after a few drinks, not exactly sobering you up but definitely pulling you down. Everyone's symptoms are slightly different, but we all are stricken from time to time. Me, I stare off into space thinking about things that have no business being thought about at a bar (do I need to buy more paper towels, what am I going to do with my life when I finish school, would it be rude or kind if I let the unfortunate girl by the bar know that I can see both her ass crack and the hem of her granny panties, etc.), prompting friends to occasionally poke me and ask "EJ? You still there?" Things move a little more slowly during the Blues, and it seems to take an inordinately long time for me to smile and nod and answer "Of course!!" just a little too brightly.

Though the Four Beer Blues can mercilessly strike unsuspecting revelers, there are often warning signs. Someone selects "High and Dry," or anything by Death Cab for Cutie on the jukebox. I find rallying for Friday nights a challenge, and the Blues are far more likely to hit at the end of a long day. The forced sobriety of a cab ride in the middle of the evening dramatically increases the likelihood of an attack, as does the sudden, unexpected appearance of an ex or an old mistake.

You can try to fight away the Four Beer Blues, to order a round of shots for your group, change the music, flirt with someone new. Sometimes it works, but only if all the elements align to distract from what triggered the Blues in the first place. More often than not, there's no going back and the evening is best ended quietly and quickly, before someone picks a fight or worse, orders and consumes an entire pizza at 4 AM. Surrender to the Four Beer Blues and no one gets hurt.

In the cab home from my latest bout with the Blues, I pondered the trigger for that night's attack. "Friendship evolution," one might call it. The natural selection process in full effect, weeding out the weaker connections that are not easily sustained to make room for new growth, new people, new possibilities. Not that they're gone forever, because you still love the old friends and have fantastic memories of time spent with them, but the paradigm has tangibly shifted. Room has been made for the new at the expense of the old.

I used to worry that instead of natural selection, I was just getting lazy and careless. That I was taking old friends for granted and sloughing them off when I got restless. But it's not that at all, something made transparently clear the next night when I spent time with much older friends, people I've known for years but hadn't seen for weeks, and didn't miss a beat with them. When you meet as many people as I do and approach life with the attitude that a stranger is a friend until they prove otherwise, you accumulate a lot of potential connections. Some will take, some will wither and die on the vine, some will seem to be going along strongly and then abruptly vanish for seemingly no reason. People will surprise you in ways good and bad, and people will live up to and down to your expectations.

I used to feel guilty about falling out of touch with people, like I'd done something negligent by not making one person or group my top priority. This has become really difficult over the last couple of years because I've found myself becoming a member of several distinct groups of friends, some overlapping one another and some completely distinct. They're all friendly people, and I wouldn't hang out with them if they weren't hilarious and kind and welcoming, but they are each very much their own clique and no matter how much I love the time I spend with them, balancing these various groups is getting exhausting. I've been out almost every night I've been in DC since school ended in May, and can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase "EJ! I haven't seen you in forever!" since then.

Hurtling towards home and bed in the cab, I thought about the people I'd just left and how little I'd seen them lately, feeling a little guilty and a little angry at the chilly reception that had been waiting for me and the empty air left hanging after the initial squeals and hugs.

And for the first time in a long time, I kicked the Four Beer Blues with one very simple conclusion: "It is not my sole responsibility to maintain a relationship."

i get by with a little help from my friends

2007-06-15T15:08:00.000Z

I was in the kitchen cooking spicy asparagus stir fry and salmon with wasabi pea crust when I heard Kristi howling with laughter from my couch. When I poked my head out the cutout window I saw that she was flipping through my saved programs on the DVR.

"Em," she asked me "exactly how many episodes of The Wonder Years do you have here?"

Even though she is a dear friend and I know she would not judge me, I just couldn't admit out loud that before I went to Ohio last weekend I deleted at least seven more episodes to make room for the Tony Awards. Because to vocalize it, to allow the words to exit my mouth and hang in the air and become part of the fabric of the universe, would inexorably establish that I am one Talbots pantsuit away from turning into my mother.

alert: right coast snobbery factor high

2007-06-12T14:03:00.000Z

After spending the weekend with extended family in southwest Ohio, I think I understand why there are so many meth labs in the Midwest.

what the career day speaker saw

2007-06-07T20:40:00.001Z

My friend B teaches at a DCPS middle school, one of the really rough ones that is more likely to be in the news for stabbings than for high test scores. To keep the kids busy at the end of the school year, she's been planning all sorts of special events for the kids who are still showing up, once of which was Career Day today. Since I work at a college, I was invited to talk about what it is like to GO to a college. B figured, quite rightly, that her class would be much more interested in what dorm life and step teams are like than the intricacies of Stafford Loans or what it means to be ABD.

These kids were great. Yes, she'd pulled the especially high-achieving students for this session, but they asked fantastic questions and were incredibly enthusiastic. They kept me there for two hours and I easily could have stayed longer, but there was an attorney waiting in the hallway to talk to them after me, and I felt a tad rude having him cool his heels while we talked about NCAA basketball.

To begin the session I'd stolen some tricks from my mother, who also works in higher ed. "How many of you know someone who has taken out a loan to buy something big?" I asked them as everyone scooted their desks into a circle. One girl shouted "a car!" Another said "a house." "Okay," I replied. "So you know that a lot of people borrow money when they want to buy something expensive. But what you may not know is the second you drive that car off the lot, it starts losing value. And the longer you use it, the less and less it is worth."

They started to look a little sober at this thought, and so I switched gears to rev them back up. "Who here thinks a million dollars is a lot of money?" I asked the kids. Everyone's hands shot up in the air, B's and mine included. "I agree," I said. "A million dollars is a LOT of money. And a study recently came out saying that over a lifetime, people who graduate from college will make an average of a MILLION dollars more than people who stop after high school."

Their eyes started to glaze over as they thought about what a big number "a million" was. "Now, think back to that car or that house that you borrowed money to get. You just as easily can borrow money to go to school. But the difference is, instead of getting less valuable, your purchase-- your education-- gets MORE valuable as time goes on. And no one can take it away from you. Your car can get stolen or maybe you can't keep your house, but you will always, always have your education. And the older you get, the more money you will make from it. That's why you can't afford NOT to go to college."

Then the boy sitting across the circle started shouting around a mouthful of Pringles, "But if I want to be an engineer, I'll make even more money than that!"

"Excuse me, sir," I said "I cannot understand you when you talk with your mouth full." (Oh LORD, what a grown-up thing to say)

The rest of the kids laughed at him as he frantically tried to swallow before someone else could start talking over him. "I mean," he exclaimed, Pringle-free, "I'd make more than a million dollars."

"Over a lifetime, yes, I'm sure you would. I'm sure that as an engineer, you'd make more money than me."

"Hells yeah I would!" he grinned, and even though I didn't want to endorse twelve-year olds swearing in the classroom, he was so impish I couldn't help but grin as well. He started paging through the course catalog I'd brought as two girls passed around my old student ID card and another boy hollered "So teachers at college don't care if you don't do your homework because then they don't have to work as hard, right?!"

I've done a lot of college recruiting before, and some with underserved populations, but this was an entirely new perspective. B warned me that some of them had siblings or parents who went to college but the majority of them had, at most, only seen college on TV. Some other questions they asked me:

What is a major?

Does the teacher smack you if you fall asleep in class?

Do you have a movie theater on campus?

Do your dorm refrigerators come with food already in them?

Why should I go to college if I know I want to be a basketball player?

How do you say "cheese" in Italian?

Can you share books with other people? Cuz books are expensive.

How much does college cost? Like a thousand dollars?

How do you play water polo?

After I answered a ton more questions (and we discussed how to write a thesis using the example "Egyptians, not aliens, build the pyramids"), one very shy girl sitting next to me in our desk circle asked me what I wanted to do with my college degree. I told her that she'd asked a very good question, because I still didn't know-- but that because I went to college I was now prepared to do a lot of different things. To teach, to write, to problem-solve, to ask hard questions and try to find answers to them. That because I graduated from college I had all sorts of options ahead of me, and that I had such a good time there I decided to stay working at a college and keep going to school. She smiled in a way that made me think that answer might have sparked something in her.

I have no idea what will happen to any of those kids, if any of them will think about what I said or flip through the glossy brochures I handed out and daydream about a life in the other Washington. I'm not naive enough to think I changed anyone's life, but I hope that maybe someone heard me when I said it wouldn't be enough to go for the easy way, and that they should challenge themselves beyond what people expected and asked of them. That they would meet a lot of people who would say that they were smart and that that was good enough, and that they shouldn't stop at "good enough."

Maybe some of it did get through. At the end of the session I asked them "and what are the three subjects you should take as much as possible in high school?" and they shouted in muddled chorus "math, science and foreign language!" Do DCPS high schools even offer foreign languages? I have no idea.

But for the brief time I spent with them, I was utterly charmed and optimistic. These kids are fantastic. I hope they get the chances they deserve to show off what they're made of, because it's good stuff.

i will stop making fun of other peoples' life choices when it stops being funny

2007-06-06T04:30:00.001Z

"This girl I know and her fiance aren't moving in together until after the wedding."

"As in, they're keeping separate apartments until the wedding night? Because then the Baby Jesus won't know they have the sex?"

"Yup. And they even live in the same neighborhood."

"That's ridiculous. People still do this? I mean, tradition is nice and all, but why not just dig a big hole and throw dollars down it?"

"Well, she's a second-year associate and he's a lawyer, too. They can afford it."

"But what a silly thing to spend extra money on. If I had that salary and wanted to waste it on something useless I'd get something really impractical and have it encrusted with diamonds."

"Like a diamond-encrusted PONY."

"A diamond-encrusted pony with ROCKETS."

"Yes! Diamond rocket ponies are a waste of money I can get behind."

how to annoy me

2007-06-02T19:17:00.000Z

Tell me that you "go to law school in Connecticut," and then casually name-drop "New Haven" a few minutes later. Wow, you're SO MODEST. CAN WE HAVE SEX NOW?

dina lohan, dave eggers and the coalition provisional authority

2007-05-31T20:47:00.000Z

One of the (many) advantages of having your life revolve around a university campus is that come summer, you find yourself with lots of free time and a brain lubed up by nine months of reading Russian historians and overusing words like "paradigm" in daily conversation. What to do with all that pent-up mental energy just waiting to be splurged all over the place?

I completely understand the impulse to turn one's brain off and spend the lazy days of summer reading chick lit novels with scrawly, loopy drawings of shoes or martini glasses on the cover. Or, maybe, not even reading at all, but instead celebrating in the sudden uselessness of critical thinking by enjoying happy hours, big-budget sequels to sequels, and reality TV along the lines of So You Think You Can Decorate, Dancing Idol: Las Vegas or similar.

However, except for that last one (because um, it would be awesome. I'm envisioning Steve Sanders doing the foxtrot with Dina Lohan, who is wearing Austin Scarlett's cornhusk dress from Season 1 of Project Runway, and then they'd have to redecorate Lindsay's suite in rehab using only $50 worth of Ikea products. Paula Abdul and Billy Joel's monotone child bride from Top Chef would host. Then in the finale Tim Gunn and Simon Cowell would show up and tell everyone how utterly ridiculous they were. LIKE YOU WOULDN'T WATCH THIS), I can't completely turn off my brain just yet. I have to power down a little, move from sprinting into a jog before I come to a complete stop, dripping with sweat from the intellectual exertion of it all.

If I don't, I might metaphor myself into a tizzy.

And so, I've been reading quite a bit over the last two weeks and have some reviews and recommendations for any other readers out there. Not just books; there are also some articles and essays I've recently read that have stayed with me:

"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack" by Peggy McIntosh (via Feministing)
For all of the conversation about gentrification and race (if you want to achieve a unique combination of anger and utter despair, check out the comment thread on this DCist post), this article is the first commentary I've come across where the author simultaneously attempts to learn more about her own motivations and prejudices while successfully avoiding the blame game on all sides. This, in my mind, is the first step in getting things done-- keeping the focus on the reality of daily life, while being sensitive to the histories and motivations (blatant or not) that created it. Easy to say, a lot harder to do in practice.

Hey, speaking of anger and utter despair!:

Babylon By Bus by Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann and Donovan Webster
After slogging through The Secret History of the Iraq War and Fiasco, I picked this up expecting to get a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure approach to the Iraq War. Surprisingly, this book has both the best on-the-ground reporting of life in Iraq leading up to Fallujah and the insurgency and the most cogent analysis of the disaster that was the CPA and American policy. This memoir of two twentysomething civilians who went to Baghdad as backpackers and wound up spending three months supervising the creation of Iraqi NGOs also points out some of the most basic ironies and unanswered questions of the war. For example, isn't it odd that every other American-led post conflict nation-building effort has been led by the State Department (or its contemporary, civilian equivalent) and Iraq's was led by the DOD-- meaning that the least democratic organization (the military) in the US was in charge of setting up democracy in an tribally-organized society that had no history of democratic tradition and was coming off thirty years of totalitarian rule? Well, hmmmm? In four years not once have I seen a reporter or political candidate make so clear a point. This book is compulsively readable and not to be missed by anyone who has ever wondered "exactly how did we get in this mess?"

And hey, speaking of messes we're in:

The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore

I keep promising to write about my deep, unwavering love for Al Gore. He was truly my first political love, and, unlike my first real love, my affection and respect for him has only been vindicated as the years pass. This book has been frequently described as "blistering," and Gore doesn't hold punches as he tries to identify the culprits as to why reason, logic and intellect have been cast as enemies to America. Such arguments have been made before, but Gore brings in several new twists that make his case for a decaying American political system even stronger. He is the first political scientist to bring in hard science on this issue, talking about how brain chemistry is changed after prolonged exposure to television over reading and human interaction. He synthesizes 9/11, the rise of the religious right, the media-entertainment complex, neoconservativism, brain physiology and Enlightenment social philosophy in an amazingly cogent, persuasive text. There's a lot to chew on in this book, and most readers will probably find things to disagree with (I know I don't find some of his lab rat anecdotes especially persuasive), but that's his point-- even if you don't agree, you're thinking, you're engaging, you're having debates with the text and yourself and maybe even other people! You're not just being talked at by a Nancy O'Dell or a Sean Hannity.

What is the What, by Dave Eggers

I want to give a copy of this book to every person who has ever whined about anything, ever. It had the power to shut me up for whole days after I finished reading it.

I have a whole huge stack waiting for me, but would love some more suggestions. What all are you reading this summer? Well, besides Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, obviously. I figure by July 21st I'll be sick of Paul Bremer and African genocide and ready for some wizarding mischief.

twitterpated

2007-05-29T18:53:00.000Z

Flower: [about two birds fluttering around] Well! What's the matter with them?
Thumper: Why are they acting that way?
Friend Owl: Why, don't you know? They're twitterpated.
Flower, Bambi, Thumper: Twitterpated?
Friend Owl: Yes. Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime. For example: You're walking along, minding your own business. You're looking neither to the left, nor to the right, when all of a sudden you run smack into a pretty face. Woo-woo! You begin to get weak in the knees. Your head's in a whirl. And then you feel light as a feather, and before you know it, you're walking on air. And then you know what? You're knocked for a loop, and you completely lose your head!
Thumper: Gosh, that's awful.
Flower: Gee whiz.

Well-said, forest friends. Well-said, indeed.

Except the part about it being awful. Because it's pretty much the exact opposite of that.

it's not whining when it's couched as playwriting

2007-05-25T18:50:00.001Z

EJ: Hi, I'm looking for a charger for this phone. She holds out a perfectly functional silver flip phone.

Cingular Employee #1: He winces in a combination of confusion and terror, like he's just seen Tori Spelling's chest cavity for the first time. I'm sorry, there's no way we have a charger for that phone. That's, like, a really old phone.

EJ: It's like three years old.

CE #1: Exactly. He smiles benevolently, as one might when a mentally challenged toddler points at a dog and yells "TRUCK!" Like I said, that's a very old model. You're really better off just upgrading to a new phone entirely and starting your contract over with better equipment.

EJ: I don't want to get a new phone. My current phone is just fine. And I really have no desire to change my entire contract just because housekeeping at the Hilton on 55th Street lost my charger. She is starting to get a little testy, as she often does when dealing with people who are condescending about technology. She is a smart girl, she knows that cell phones are capable of taking photos and syncing up with iPods and performing laparoscopic surgery, she's just not interested in all those bells and whistles.

CE #1: I mean, you could try to go online to one of those appliance warehouse sites and try to find a charger there. But you really should just get a whole new calling system.

EJ: A "calling system?"

CE #1: He calls out to a man across the store. Hey Tyrone, come over and see this.

Tyrone comes over to check out the phone, oblivious to the confusion on EJ's face. His jaw literally drops open as he turns over the phone in his hands, then quietly chuckles to himself.

CE #1: She says she needs a charger for this.

Tyrone: Good luck with that. Exeunt Tyrone.

EJ: So you don't have a charger for it.

CE #1: Not a chance. A phone that old...

EJ: Getting perhaps a little more angry than is appropriate for the situation. Look, if you don't carry the charger, fine. But I'm not spending a hundred dollars and re-upping my contract to replace something that works perfectly well.

CE #1: He is now a bit nervous. He senses that he and Tyrone have been too overt in their mocking this girl with the ancient, Luddite technology. But we have lots of inexpensive phones here with cameras, with wireless capability, that will sync up with your Outlook...

EJ: But all I want to do is make and receive phone calls. And texts. And this phone does that!

CE #1: Well, fine.

EJ: FINE. THANKS FOR YOUR HELP.

Exeunt EJ, in a righteous huff. She turns on her heel pivoting out the door and proceeds to walk smack into a puffy, be-suited man yelling into his Blackberry. He ignores her completely as he shoves past her into the Starbucks next door.

EJ: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

FIN.

you are now entering a whine-free zone

2007-05-22T04:00:00.000Z

Okay. I declare EJ Takes Life to be a no-whining zone for the rest of the week. Entirely too much whining has taken place here, particularly when there are so many things to be thankful for.

Like family and vacations:

Like home and new rugs and finally getting rid of my busted Ikea furniture:

Like insanely hot new boots bought for a tenth of the original price (I swear, they look better on me. Like, movie star-better):

Of course, these all don't mean that someone is necessarily a good person. After all, a good person sees a desperately thirsty cat and thinks "I should get her water," not "this is a cheezburger moment:"

crime report 5/22/07, with commentary

2007-05-21T14:32:00.000Z

I was going to write about New York this weekend. I was going to write about my dad's birthday dinner at Klee and running into Perez Hilton at Company on Saturday night. I was going to write about my insane new couture boots that I saw in Vogue a last month and then bought on mega double-secret sale on a rainy Saturday afternoon. About how a salesgirl in SoHo finally convinced me to embrace leggings and admit to myself that while I feel silly wearing them, they do make my legs look a million miles long. About the unbelievable intensity that is stage seats for Spring Awakening and the unbelievably fun dorkiness that is going to hear one of the actor's bands later that night at a ratty club in that sketchy part of the West 30s.

But I'm not going to, because when I went out to my car this morning I found the window smashed in and my CDs and an ancient laptop wrapped in a sheet both missing.

And so I'm really, really pissed off.

I'm really, really pissed off that a mere six weeks after moving and two weeks after getting groped and having strangers call me a bigot when I wrote about it, my car was broken into.

I'm really, really pissed at myself. It's not like I'm some hick who just moved to the Big City. How stupid was I to leave anything remotely of value in my car parked in Columbia Heights? Very, that's how stupid. Very, very, very stupid. No excuse. I should have known better. Of course, that laptop was utterly virus-ridden and virtually inoperable. I had grand dreams of refurbishing it and giving it to charity. Now I just really hope that the thief tries to use it before he hocks it. Maybe he'll use it to try to charge a (stolen) iPod, or maybe his pacemaker. That'd be swell.

I'm really, really pissed off that I'm just supposed to accept things like this as reality, because there's a voice in my head telling me that this is what living in a city means and if I can't deal then there's always the burbs. I hate this voice. It's the same voice I used with my mother when we were having brunch yesterday in Hell's Kitchen and she asked if I'd ever consider not living in a city. It's contemptful and disbelieving and while I'm not happy that I used it with my mother, having it saw in my head as I fume this morning does not seem fair payback.

I'm really, really pissed that today it feels like either/or, baby. Today feels like a day where nuance is a no-show and it feels like a choice between living in a safe space where a girl can take for granted that her car will remain where she parked it but where everyone looks the same and thinks the same and eats the same and takes the same mundane pleasures in the same pathetic things, or living in a dynamic community with the smell of jerk chicken and the sounds of bossa nova wafting over the streets, coming from homes full of people with whom I have nothing in common but who are mostly very, very good people, except the ones who yell and grab and rob without a care in the world.

I'm trying to stay focused on the office worker from the Baptist church who came out to meet me as I stared blankly at the gaping hole where my window used to be. I'd rather think about his kindness when he told me how he tried to report the break-in to the police when he first saw it on Saturday morning (yes-- Saturday morning) than that utterly stupid DCPD law that only an owner can report a break-in. Sadly, I already knew this. Way to encourage neighborhood friendliness and civil society, right?

And I'm really trying not to let this crap ruin memories of a wonderful weekend. Truth be told, insurance (which I pay an obscene amount for) will cover the damage and I don't care about the laptop. The CDs-- well, that hurt. I had every mix CD I've made or received since college taken. No two ways about it, that blows. Somehow I doubt that the thief listens to the Decemberists or the Polyphonic Spree, like, ever. But yes, I know that it's a miracle that my car was even still there, much less relatively intact. Lordy, I spent the train ride back yesterday reading What is the What. You have no idea how much I hate myself for even whining about CDs and a broken window right now.

Which, of course, makes me hate this thief even more. For committing an act against me that led to me feeling guilty for feeling angry.

Got that? No? Yeah, me neither.

Mostly, I'm just tired. I am thoroughly tired of constantly defending my lifestyle and my neighborhood, and to be honest, I'm tired of defending it to myself. I'm utterly sick of the round-robin cycle of gentifiers' woes and yuppie guilt and of so hopelessly embodying the cliche of the entitled white gentrifier. Of the voice in my head reminding me that this is really not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and of the second voice counterarguing that hey, maybe it could have been worse but it is still most certainly not okay what happened. Someone robbed me, I'm arguing with myself and I'm so very over all of it.

a letter to myself, or; why seven diet cokes makes one's brain bleed

2007-05-15T03:51:00.000Z

Dear EJ Six Months From Now,

Hi! It's me, Present Day EJ. I'm currently sitting in a study carrel in our campus library, surrounded by several volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States, empty Smarties wrappers and a pile of bloody Kleenex. I just got my second bloody nose of the day for absolutely no identifiable reason. Except that maybe I've read so many recently declassified CIA cables that our brain has started leaking out our head. If that's the case, I'm really sorry. You're probably missing that extra brain right about now.

Despite how grim that all sounds, I'm writing to you to remind you how good you had it in May. You only had one class, and you got to pick a paper topic that your geeky self at least somewhat enjoyed (because when normal sixteen-year-old girls in 1998 were obsessed with the Backstreet Boys and figuring out how long one should date a boy before going to third base stopped being slutty and started being good behavior, we were obsessed with rereading The Poisonwood Bible and lamenting the unlikelihood that we would ever personally witness a sub-Saharan African revolution). Yes, my thesis changed quite a bit over the last month, the last week, and, um, okay, the last weekend, but it's 12:01 AM of the day the beast is due, and, save a final edit, I'm pretty much done. That hasn't happened since our sophomore year of college, a year which saw us write the first of three papers in our academic career in which we referenced Paris Hilton. By the by, that we got into graduate school proves that there is a God, and that She has a great sense of humor.

Oh, also emember that you got to finish this paper in a study carrel, an experience that combines the focus and energy of a library with the privacy that allows one to eat Wendy's for dinner while blasting The Hold Steady and later talk on her cell phone as she makes a major timeline breakthrough in the Brazzaville cables section of her study. It's enough to make a girl want to pursue a PhD, after all.

So basically, you have it just fine now. That cab ride home will be a tad pricey, but I think of it as an investment that would otherwise be spent on Tums tomorrow as I tried to frantically finish the damn thing while not letting our boss know that I'm doing schoolwork all day. You know that feeling, the gut-twisting panic as your fingers flutter over the keyboard, the air between them and the computer seeming a terrible barrier to putting words, any words, on the page that is due in your prof's box in ten minutes? Remember that feeling. Now, remember how you felt right now. I'll give you a hint: SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER.

So come finals for fall semester, when you're tempted by holiday parties and happy hours and weekends in New York and seeing the Nutcracker, remember how very not at all bad this was. If I can spend three days doing wedding stuff for some of our closest friends and still punch out this sucker in time to not have a heart attack, then there is no reason for you to stall until the last minute like we usually do. Cuz remember, kiddo: you're going to have TWO classes this fall. As in "TWICE AS MUCH CLASS WITH JUST AS MUCH WORK, AND, PLEASE GOD, JUST AS MUCH IF NOT MORE FUN." So do what you have to do. Stop spending Saturday mornings watching TiVoed episodes of The Wonder Years and Buffy. Stop letting Jim from Capitol Hill books give you free Wallace Stegner novels. Spend lunch hour reading Clausewitz, not Gawker.

And I really hope you enjoyed our choice not to take classes this summer. I hope you read all that Stegner and that whole other stack of fiction sitting in our den, that you finally finished unpacking the new place and took a lot of road trips. I hope you spent time with our friends and family and maybe even some boys. I hope you learned to cram in fun time when you could get it, because we're going to get a lot less of it over the next two years. And kiddo, I really hope you learned how to not write blog entries after midnight, because MAN, we ramble.

Now, turn off the TV and go do your homework.

Love,

Present Day EJ

PS- Empty Sadie's box. Just because we have papers doesn't mean others should suffer. Plus she's already figured out how to fling litter all over the bathmat and by fall finals she'll probably know how to smuggle it into the sheets.

i'm the girl who loves you

2007-05-14T01:57:00.000Z

I have the misfortune of being both a compulsive planner and terribly disorganized. This leads to scenarios like the one that transpired on Friday evening, the night of K and A's rehearsal dinner. Of course I'd known about it for months, had it marked on both my Outlook and the wall calendar in my kitchen, but did that keep me from buying a ticket to the Ben Gibbard show for the same night? Or from putting the concert on both my Outlook AND calendar, right below the rehearsal dinner? And from not noticing "hey there! I have a lot going on that night!" until, um, Wednesday?

Of course the rehearsal dinner trumped Ben Gibbard, but had I known that John Krasinski would not only be onstage with Ben Gibbard, but that John Krasinski would be singing "I Am Trying To Break Your Heart," I can't promise that I would have made the same choice. Furthermore, I can't promise that I wouldn't have sold the groom's grandma for spare cash to bribe my way backstage.

It is a testament to my love for K and A that I did not ditch the wedding entirely to spend the weekend trying to hunt down Jim Halpert. But in the end common decency, happiness for my friends and the anti-stalking statutes of the District of Columbia got me to the synagouge on Saturday.

I knew it would be beautiful, because K has been planning her wedding day pretty much since birth and is blessed with both great taste and a will of reinforced steel. What I was not prepared for was how unbelievably, gorgeously stunning she herself was. Think every cliche you've ever heard about a bride glowing on her wedding day and multiply it tenfold. She was spectacular. K has me thinking I really need to have a wedding soon, because it apparently does absolutely magical things for one's skin and hair. And A didn't look bad, either.

Everyone cried during the weding and danced their best white people dance moves at the reception. Bless them for springing for a band that were once finalists on Star Search. Bless their lead singer for bringing K's mom to the microphone to sing a Patsy Cline number. Bless the expressions of K's Oklahoma-bred parents as they were lifted up on chairs during the horah.

Yes, it might have been even more perfect if John Krasinski had been my date. But watching how insanely happy my friends were and celebrating an amazing start to their marriage, thoughts of "if only" were miles away.

Congratulations, A and K. I love you both even more than John Krasinski singing Wilco.

mr. and mrs. K and A

2007-05-11T14:05:00.000Z

I've struggled for a few days now to write something that honors my friends K and A, who are getting married tomorrow. We've known each other for almost seven years now, since we lived on the same floor of our freshman dorm, and they're the first from our college group of friends to tie the knot.

I don't often write about my close friends in this space because the voice I use here isn't always the best for doling out compliments or writing kind descriptions. It's difficult to paint a picture of a person without including the quirks, and I worry that in my snarky voice any descriptions of the things I love about my friends-- the way A yells along his agreement with Fox News or the the time K told us that she hated Rocky Road ice cream because it makes her think of fisting-- would sound trite or worse, condescending. Which, let's face it, pretty much describes a lot of my writing.

Plus, it would be really boring of me to say "I love you guys and I'm so excited for you and know you'll make it work." Yes, I do and I am and I do, but how does one make that into something that is fun for an audience of strangers to read?

Perhaps a story will best illustrate what I am (very inarticulately) trying to say. The morning after her bachelorette party, K took us girls out to breakfast at the Silver Diner. While we were inhaling coffee and biscuits and home fries, she told us about an awful girl she knows who recently tried to freak her out about getting married. "Aren't you totally scared of marriage?" Awful Girl asked. "Like, after you guys get married you'll be all... old, and stuff."

"Not really," K told her. "We're pretty much old already."

Which is true. Even though they're both very fun 25 year olds, we give them a lot of grief for being prematurely old. I'm pretty sure that the rehearsal dinner tonight and the wedding tomorrow will be the first time they've both been out on a Friday AND Saturday since junior year. They like wine and artisinal cheese and board games that allow A to air his competitive streak in a safe environment. They like a close circle of friends who are all up in each other's business and both enjoy hating Rachael Ray and loving Giada De Laurentiis. They both are really, really happy with each other and with planning their life together. And wow, that is cool. I don't know a lot of people our age who are truly, genuinely content with their day to day lives and with their anticipated futures.

When the first person from a group of friends gets married, there's often a collective tendency for people to freak a little bit. Duh, it's a huge big scary irrevocably grownup step. Honestly, I expected that as K and A's wedding approached I would completely freak out and have typical Girl thoughts like "Oh my god, I can't believe she's getting married/I'm gonna die alone."

But I'm surprising myself by not having those thoughts spring up at all. I'm just happy for my friends and looking forward to the fun party. My normal urge to obsessively compare and navel-gaze is completely gone from these proceedings because I'm just really excited for K and A. Because they are prematurely old, and because I love them both, and because more than any other couple I know, I believe they can handle this huge big scary irrevocably grownup step.

sniffle

2007-05-07T13:33:00.000Z

Okay, I have GOT to get that picture off the top of my blog.

Dum-de-dum-dum-de-dum...

Gone yet?

Still there...?

Okay, fine. How about a list to take up space?

Reasons Why Being Sick All Weekend Sucked

- Apparently my body is old and can no longer handle eleven consecutive nights of going out. I shall now retire to the old folks' home with my Dentu-Grip and Centrum Silver.

- I missed a whole bunch of great parties, including Brunch Bird's Derby party, DJ's birthday at Sonoma and a Cinco de Mayo margaritas fiesta with Hey Pretty and 123 Valerie. Where was the flu when in February, when I had no parties but my birthday??? I mean, it just doesn't seem fair.

- The actual being sick part, which started off as "not fun" when my throat closed up on Friday morning and quickly became "like having my head gripped between the thighs of a very angry giant" as the throat closing migrated northward and became a sinus headache so intense that by Sunday morning I fully expected to sneeze out a diamond.

- Being that sick made any thought of working on my scary final paper, due in a week, utterly impossible. This is not so good, as I currently have two pages written and a weekend of wedding stuff up ahead. Oh, and the professor informed me last week that another student in the class has already written a fantastic, much longer paper on the same topic and that he expects me to propse a new angle on the subject. That might have been very helpful to know, oh, when we had our topics approved in FEBRUARY.

- Living alone is really great, except for when you're sick and you manage to get up enough energy to go stumble to the bodega down the block to buy more Advil Cold & Sinus and when you get there you realize you've forgotten your wallet and home suddenly seems A MILLION MILES AWAY, LIKE, GOD, and if you still lived with a roommate then she or he could go to the bodega and get you Advil Cold & Sinus, actually, based on the roommates you've had before, they could just open up the three-drawer plastic dresser of medication in their room and you could go crazy on it while they made you some soup.

Reasons Why Being Sick All Weekend Was Actually Kind of Okay

- The WE! Women's Entertainment made-for-TV movie Prince William.

- The entire third and fourth seasons of Boy Meets World.

- Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup with Extra Sodium, followed by Haagen Daas Bailey's Ice Cream. For three days.

- Sadie was pretty much ready to run away from home because she'd barely seen me in two weeks and was spending all her time crying under the bed and coughing up hairballs on my new sofa. After three days of hardcore cuddling time, she's finally the sweet, happy kitty I adopted. Still fatter and liable to shed all over everything, but happy again. She also makes an excellent pillow when all the other pillows fall off the couch and I'm too weak to pick them up.

small PENSIS! LOL

2007-05-03T13:28:00.000Z

This was waiting for me in my work email this morning. Several thoughts entered my head when I saw this photo, and naturally, I am compelled to share them with you now:

- Judging by the dopey grin on the whale's face, this is quite possibly the first time he's ever been laid.

- Is the blue of the sheet meant to represent the ocean? The mystical memory of humankind rising forth from the primordial sea, leaving our fishy ancestors behind as we ventured into the exciting world of processing oxygen, knowing we would someday metaphorically return to our homeland via a union with a whale? Or is it just what the prop guy happened to have on hand?

- What, praytell, is a "pensis?" It is what the kids these days are calling penpals? If so, might one also have a penbro? Or does that make you penbi? Might parents write to their penkids? Curiouser and curiouser, indeed...

- Why is the whale using "LOL?" He lacks the opposable thumbs to instant-message, and presumably the vocal cords that would enable him to "LOL" in the first place. I agree with him that the size of her husband's pensis is indeed amusing, but find his word choice in expressing the matter to be somewhat surprising.

- There is a "humpback whale" joke somewhere in here but I can't quite flesh it out. Suggestions?

- This is the best spam email I've ever gotten. Including the one that asked if Thumb Drives were the modern-day Dongle.

MC with the hispanic guy on the bike who grabbed my ass last night

2007-05-02T19:00:00.000Z

I saw you furiously pedaling down 16th Street north of Adams Morgan last night, moments after you languidly biked up behind me and grabbed my ass.

I ask you, why run away so quickly? The deliberateness of your act signaled to me that you felt we shared something really special. For a simple ass-grabbing you really took your time, generously cupping your fingers around my right butt cheek and taking the extra second to poke dangerously close to my Secret Lady Places. That's the kind of effort that tells a girl "I care."

Likewise, when you uttered "heh" under your breath at the exact moment your hand made contact with my ass, I know what you really meant to say was "I respect and value your personhood. You have important contributions to make to the world that go far beyond your rockin' ass. You are an individual who matters and I would never objectify, humiliate or assault you."

It was a shame that our contact was so brief. Perhaps as you rode up and prepared to grope me you overheard me talking to my father on my cell phone. If so, I completely understand-- it's way too soon to meet the parents. I don't want to pressure you.

I hope that you didn't misinterpret my reaction to your loving caresses. When I screamed at your retreating form "Who the fuck do you think you are, asshole?!" I didn't mean it in a mean way. By yelling "come back here and try that again without your little tricycle, you pansy-ass motherfucker" I merely meant to suggest that if we were to do this again sometime, you might want to consider alternative forms of transportation. Cars on 16th Street are very aggressive, and those Maryland drivers do not always watch the road the way they should.

In conclusion, I know that we are probably not meant to be-- after all, I'm a hot girl who owns her own home and has a job, you're a degenerate middle-aged man who rides a bicycle, gets his rocks off on assaulting strange women and probably has private parts that can only be viewed with high-powered microscope equipment. *Sigh* That old song again.

If, by chance we are lucky enough to meet again, I hope you don't flee so quickly. I'd love to chat this time, maybe get to know each other a little better. Where I come from, I do that by pushing men into southbound traffic. It'll be so special.

and your little penis cake, too

2007-05-01T17:05:00.000Z

Had I my camera, you would be reading a big long photo essay about my friend Kat's bachelorette party last Saturday night. You aren't reading that post because I left my camera at our hostesses' apartment, along with my shirt, my dignity and half of a vegan non-dairy gluten-free vanilla cake with "Penis Cake" written on it in red icing (proving that when a bride says "don't you dare get me a penis cake" it is possible to obey the spirit and yet not the letter of the law).

There are plenty of other people's photos from the rest of the night, but a story really best sums it up. There were a lot of great moments early in the night-- for example, did you know that the Eastern Market CVS doesn't sell Swiffer pads but does sell vibrating cock rings? Now you do!-- but my favorite memory is from around 2 am at "The Club," the decidedly sketchy second floor of Hawk and Dove (aka, "The Dirty Pigeon"). We spent a lot of time at the Pidge in college, as it was the only place where we could reliably get served as freshmen. Sure enough, by our stroll-down-memory-lane stop there at the end of the night, we were by far the oldest people on the dance floor. We felt like chaperones at the prom as we watched the crowds of teenagers bump and grind to Chingy and Petey Pablo. That was about when a group of extremely animated and grabby guys started dancing up on our bride, who by this point could not have focused her eyes if you'd put a gun to her head or worse, threatened to steal her centerpieces.

Apparently we were not terribly subtle with our annoyance with these little boys, because the most flamboyant one of them suddenly whipped out his Sidekick and began to frantically type a message into it, which he then held aloft for us to read:

"We're gay and we're sorry if we're too much for you!"

Yup. We were sharing our dance floor space with a bunch of gay deaf freshman boys from Gallaudet.

Needless to say, we had a fucking awesome night.

I also had a great night last night, as Candy Sandwich and I went to St. Ex for drinks and then caught Peter Bjorn & John at 9:30. I went into the show feeling a little sorry for the band, having read that they played to a tiny audience at Coachella because they were in the same time slot as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. What's the point of playing a giant festival like Coachella if you're playing to a couple hundred people in a cavernous space? That's got to be tough for a band, even one with as much buzz behind them as this one.

They put on a good show last night, though a lot of the set was good in a "I know Pitchfork says they're good and well, yeah" kind of way. Whether this was because of the band or the crowd was hard to tell. Even though it was a sold-out house for an on-the-rise indie band, not a lot of people acted terribly excited to be there. During one acoustic number, there was so much chatter from the house that it felt uncomfortably like that scene in Annie Hall where Diane Keaton sings "It Had To Be You" to an unenthralled cabaret audience. CS and I also had the misfortune to be standing in front of some very obnoxious girls who spent the entire set alternately bitching about how tall I was (well, yes, that sucks for you, but you're not watching the show. And I'm standing right behind the tallest guy in the place, anyways) (hi Brokekid! happy birthday, sir) and drunkenly laughing so hard they were cackling. Like, Wicked Witch of the West, "and your little dog, too!" full-on cackling.

The cacklers left before the last song of the main set, and it was like someone flipped a switch. The band went from "hey, this is nice music" to balls-out rocking the house in no time flat. CS, BrokeKid and I all looked at each other in confused excitement as if to say "where has this been all night?!" All of a sudden these gently quirky Swedish boys had the crowd whipped into a frenzy. They brought it back down with the beginning of the encore, and then raised it back up again with the final two songs of the night. Those last four songs made me even more excited about going to Lollapalooza, which I didn't think was possible.

People don't cackle in Chicago, right? Right??

gettin hot in herrrr

2007-04-26T02:33:00.000Z

I recently had dinner with my friend L, a person who, every time I hang out with her, has me leave the evening thinking "And why don't we do this more?" Because really, she's awesome. I also usually leave with a blood alcohol content that would get me arrested in 34 states and Puerto Rico, but that's another story.

At this recent dinner she told me about a product that she described variously as "life-changing," "slightly embarassing" and "makes me feel really okay about listening to Nelly." Behold: the OhMiBod.

For those of you too frozen with glee to click on the link: The audio enabled integrated microchip allows the OhMiBod to vibrate to the beat and rhythm of your music while you listen.

You read that right. It's a vibrator. That pulses in time to music.

Squuuueeeeeeeeal!

It's like the baby Jesus knew that I haven't had noteworthy sex in a hideously long time and through divine intervention and the divine Internet sought to provide a welcome distraction.

Why is the music component so important? Listening to your favorite sexy music and actually feeling the corresponding vibes quickly transports you to a place where music, mind and body truly "come" together.

I am so in love with the mere suggestion of this product that I don't mind the sixth-grade level punning.

Measures 5 1/2" long (insertable) and 1 1/8" in diameter.

Okay, now this may be somewhat of a problem. I mean, I'm hardly a size queen, but come on.

And I do have to confess, I find myself somewhat creeped out by the idea of attaching this device to a stereo or computer, as suggested by the website. An iPod is small enough to be unobtrusive, but the suggestion of a more ponderous electronic device conjures mental pictures that, frankly, are not very sexy. In fact, they are pretty effing bizzare, and in some cases inspire the exact opposite feeling that I am sure the OhMiBod is meant to impart.

These minor worries aside, I am still completely turned on by the delicious idea of the OhMiBod and will totally be ordering one. I already have a playlist for pretty much every activity I engage in daily, including Cooking and Cleaning My Pigsty of An Apartment, Running Off My Shame, Dancing Around Like A Total Dork, Morning Commute and "Hanging Out" With Someone New, so why not add in Masturbation?

So, now that we've established 1) that the existence of God is proven by this product and 2) that the complete lack of men in the greater Washington area who know what to do with a woman's body is such that I have spent sixty-nine dollars on this product, what do you suggest for my playlist?

chicken; or, different types of "into you"

2007-04-23T03:43:00.000Z

"So, I wanted to tell you something."

I was sitting on couch in a complete stranger's apartment with J, one of my oldest friends and the only person currently in Washington who knew me at a time in my life when I wore glasses, braces and a souvenir Les Miserables sweatshirt to school every day.

We were at this apartment because we ran into one other earlier in the evening in Dupont Circle. I was reading and trying to figure out what I'd be doing that night, he had just gotten stood up for a first date with a guy he met on the Metro. We decided it was serendipity and that we would obviously be hanging out.

He told me he'd been at a garage sale earlier and had bought some Christmas lights and a poster of a midnight blue cat (seriously, this is how he speaks-- tremendously deliberate with his words), but that he'd left them at the house because he didn't want to carry them on the date. The people holding the sale were having "a soiree" and had invited him to stop by-- did I want to join? Um, a total stranger's party on a summery Saturday night? Did he even need to ask?

"Great," he said. "But first, can we stop and get some chicken?"

Well, sure. Because when you go to the goodbye party of someone you've never met, it's only polite to bring a chicken.

"No, I just stopped being a vegetarian and I really need the protein. I'll cook it for myself after the party."

Marvelous. So deliciously random. This is why I live in a city.

So we got a chicken from the Soviet Safeway and walked to the strangers' house off U Street, passing several barbecues and other parties spilling out onto the sidewalks. One house in particular was set back from the street, leaving enough of a yard for an enormous peasant table and plank benches filled with people passing huge plates of food and toasting each other as they laughed, probably about something from NPR or The New Yorker. They looked so content and happy in the glow of company and the candlelight that J and I literally stopped in our tracks to gawp at them. He finally tugged at my elbow when they noticed us staring, guiding me back down the bumpy brick sidewalk as he whispered "Someday, EJ. Someday soon."

We got to the house and the hosts reiterated their offer to crash the party, so J and I soon found ourselves standing in their kitchen, drinking Blue Moons as their friends entertained us with stories of their Peace Corps service and spelunking days. We stayed for so long that J realized his chicken was going to spoil soon, and so he asked one of the roommates if he could put his chicken in her freezer. I'm not sure which was better, when she thought it was a euphemism for something naughty or when she realized no, he just had a chicken he needed to freeze.

Which is how we came to be sitting on a couch in a stranger's living room, a little drunk on beer, summer and unexpected coincidences. We were talking about dating and relationships, and I was loudly proclaiming that I'd never, ever again date a bisexual man because there's already too much competition with beautiful, brilliant women and why add in a whole other damn gender and besides, for so many guys being bi is just a rest stop on the road to Gay when J stopped me: "So, I wanted to tell you something."

"What'd you want to tell me?" I asked, setting my beer on the warped hardwood floor.

"You're going to think this is crazy, but I thought I should tell you-- I'm kind of into you."

That one made me sit upright. I knew J was bi, but he was also one of my oldest friends in the world and I'd never gotten a whiff that he might be interested in me. If anything, I worried he was disappointed in me because I'd become too much of a cynic, that I was too dead inside after seven years here.

"Seriously?" I smiled, and he grinned back. "Yeah, I just thought you should know. I mean, I know you aren't into bi guys and that we aren't ever going to... whatever. But I thought you should know. I mean, it's a compliment to you."

I didn't really know what to say, because I wanted to tell J how very touched I was by his complete lack of guile while not being patronizing. Watching him run his enormous hand through his curly black mop of hair, I let my mind fill with all of the great moments we've shared over the years. From dividing up the lyrics of "I Am the Walrus" to quote in our eighth-grade yearbook, to the transcendent naked puppy pile New Years' Eve to earlier that night, when we explained to a group of new friends how we were childhood friends who ran into one another at Lebanese Taverna almost a year ago, surprise!

"J," I said "you know you're one of my people, right? I mean, one of my people-people that you carry with you forever."

"Of course," he grinned back. "And you know you are for me, too."

"I think there's different types of 'into you,'" I said, picking up my Blue Moon and running my finger along the label's edge. "And I'm so glad that you can tell me something like that and know that we won't miss a beat."

"Because I'm your people."

"Because you're my people who talks about midnight blue cats and who stores chicken in a stranger's freezer when we crash their party."

"'Different types of into you,'" he mused, resting his skinny body into the folds of the couch. "I like it." He grinned at me. "So I think we should do this again soon."

"What, run into each other and have a random adventure where you store your chicken in some girl's freezer?"

"Yes."

"Absolutely."

because some levity is really in order right about now

2007-04-19T20:15:00.000Z

There has been a pair of black leggings in the copy room since Monday.

Sometimes they're on the counter. Sometimes they're on the chair. I would not be terribly surprised if tomorrow I went to stow my Diet Coke in the fridge and they were in there, casually flung next to someone's three-day-old Bertucci's pizza, an errant hem dangerously flapping at the edge of the salad crisper.

How did they get there? I wonder. Did a modern dance enthusiast get lost on her way to a performance and somehow wind up in our suite, whereupon she shed half her clothes in confusion and despair? Is that troll-like woman who always leaves the bathroom door open actually a Sienna Miller impersonator by night? Did one of the HUNDREDS of undergrad girls who crowd the sidewalks clad in ballet flats, black leggings and very very small jean skirts suddenly realize "my God, my normal-sized ass looks enormous in this ridiculous outfit!" and run into the nearest open office to frantically change into sweatpants like a normal college student should wear? And leave the evidence behind? Inquiring minds want to know, people!

Do you have a better idea of how a pair of leggings came to live in our copy room? Knowing the origin of the infestation is key. Because if they set up camp for good and start inviting gaucho pants and high-rise pleated jeans to come live with them, I'm going to have to get a new job. A new job in a place where ill-advised trendy pants don't randomly visually assault the employees.

Workplace safety, friends. Now more than ever.

that little vein in my forehead is one more asinine interview away from bursting

2007-04-19T03:25:00.000Z

I didn't think it was possible for me to have simultaneous respect for President Bush and extreme contempt for the media, but this week has proved that the unthinkable does happen.

I've trashed him quite enough in this space and in life, and so I'll say here that I think Bush has behaved in a remarkably tasteful and classy manner this week. His speech at the convocation was entirely appropriate and one got the sense that he was profoundly affected by the grief and the unity that was shown in that ceremony. He did not hog the spotlight there and kept the focus on the community and on President Steger, which is exactly as it should be now. He's also so far been staying out of the shockingly tasteless battle over gun control that began almost as soon as the last shot was fired on Monday, though I doubt that will last long. But for now, well played indeed. Unlike, say, pretty much every major American media outlet.

I'm not in the slightest bit exaggerating when I say that I shrieked and jumped when I saw the photos of Cho Seung-Hui posted on the New York Times homepage earlier this evening. NBC had a chance to do the decent, non-profit-driven thing and to, I don't know, NOT give a mass murderer the satisfaction of immortality by broadcasting his demented ramblings to a raw public that really, really did not need to see him snarling at the camera with the very weapons he would use to murder his classmates. I'm not remotely suprised that they published these photos and videos, but that doesn't keep me from being disgusted with the speed with which the talking heads line up to bray about "senseless" and "tragic" while splashing these terrible images around, adding to the grief and horror as they breathlessly decry it.

The idea that the survivors will see these pictures and re-live that morning, that the victims' parents, spouses, siblings and friends will know exactly what the victims saw at their last moment is beyond sickening. What possible "news value" is there in these photos that supercedes the dignity and peace owed to the survivors and the dead alike? Did the leaders of a soulless corporate media not once pause to imagine a student who survived the massacre seeing a photo of the murderer wielding the same gun he'd tried to kill them with? Did they not for a moment think of what was decent in a time of mourning?

It is not the job of the press to protect the public, but it is their duty to help the public make sense of events. These photos and videos contribute nothing to our understanding of why this tragedy happened. They just reinforce what we already knew: that a deeply sick, corrupted individual did something incomprensibly awful.

I'm overwhelmed with disgust for the media right now. They've taken an unexplainable tragedy and were almost instantly swarming like vultures trying to find someone to blame, be it the administration, the permissive gun culture, the not-permissive-enough gun culture, the mental health profession, whatever. The media didn't kill anyone. That was all Cho Seung-Hui. But if Anderson Cooper, Brian Williams, Katie Couric and Larry King want to know who is responsible for all the grief that the Virginia Tech community is feeling, they could take a long, hard look in the mirror. They could ask themselves how shocking an unsuspecting audience with the cold eyes of a murderer and the barrel of his gun in any way contributes to understanding or healing.

virginia tech

2007-04-17T19:01:00.000Z

I'm sitting here at my desk, finishing edits to an important document and watching the Virginia Tech convocation stream over CBS News. This sounds terribly crass and clueless, but I didn't really get the full scale of it until I spoke with my mom last night. Like me, she works on a college campus, but unlike me, she works on a typical college campus. The kind with lots of sprawling green spaces and undergrads in flannel pajama pants who take the bus to 8 AM classes. An actual quad where people play frisbee golf in between lectures. Where internships are pretty much only for summer and people go to frat parties with crappy campus bands, not one of the few schools in the country that actually had a campus lock-down plan before 9/11 (thank you so much, IMF riots). She works at a school that is like the school she worked at when I was a child.

My mother does not typically get unglued. But last night, as she talked about the shootings at Virginia Tech, she sounded more freaked out than when she called me to tell me my father was in the ER.

College is a rarified time and space for almost everyone who goes, a safe chunk away from real life tedium and drudgery. It's lazy Tuesday afternoons watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force mixed with genuine excitement at actually acquiring knowledge, practically feeling the new wrinkles in your brain being formed. It's an enormous privilege and responsibility, and I know for me, it was the time in my life I most looked forward to. It's mistakes and successes and tears and finding passion and having the safety to screw it all up and start over.

It comes down to safety. The fun and chance of discovery aren't possible without knowing that, within reason, you are protected from yourself and from others. Growing pains aren't just allowed, they're expected. How many other times have there been so many bodies- academic, financial, personal, medical, social, political- dedicated to making sure we get where we need to go and get there in one piece?

They all together create an atmosphere of freedom that is uniquely and unmistakably collegiate. Growing up on a college campus, I was always thrilled when my mother took me into the dorms where she worked with students or let me tag along as she directed teams of students at their summer jobs leading tour groups and welcoming new freshmen. Even as a little kid, I got a contact high off the collective giddiness, the idea that they were at the beginning of something new and huge and scary and that they couldn't wait to stumble out of the starting block. Those memories are a big part of why I'm still in higher education today.

I know what she felt, and what I'm starting to let myself feel, is not just sympathy for the Virginia Tech family. Something even bigger than their campus community was damaged on Monday. The idea of a college or university somehow set apart from the "real world" is gone. There's a real sense of a sacred space being violated, and to me it somehow feels even scarier than another Columbine or a workplace shooting because I know, rationally, that there is nothing that can be done to stop something like it from happening again.

How do you stop a madman that is determined to destroy his surroundings? If you have the benefit of a single building with doors that lock and exits that can be guarded, there are ways. There are ID cards that swipe you into buildings and key-in code touch pads and lots of armed security guards. But on a college campus? You can't do it without violating in turn the physical freedoms of the campus.

Don't be quick to dismiss these. The freedom to wander and explore and try on new ideas and identities, to change your mind and change it back again. It's a literal physical freedom, too-- on a college campus, pretty much anyone can wander anywhere and do whatever they want. How many of you had an out-of-the-way place you thought of as "yours," whether for studying or sex or just being, reveling in all of delicious little discoveries you were making every day? If you had to swipe a key card to get where you needed to go, were restricted to only those places that were deemed essential, then how could you make your campus your own?

I'm not trying to pretend that universities are still idyllic ponds of utopian peace. Any naive notions of that were gone by the time the National Guard stationed a tank outside my sophomore year residence hall. But I still have an idea in my head of the possibility of a campus away from a city, where news cameras only show up to document student protests on janitors' rights and classes meet under trees when the weather is nice. A campus like the university of my childhood, or what Virginia Tech seemed to be and hopefully will be again soon. I'm so deeply sorry for what their community must be going through. I really can't begin to imagine what this feels like.

two bored worker bees/graduate students rumanite on their dongles

2007-04-16T20:39:00.000Z

EJ: i just got the most awesome spam headline ever
EJ: "Thumb Drives: The Modern-Day Dongle?"
X: what do you suppose a serious email with that headline would include?
X: it'd come from hr
X: and be an explanatory email about how to properly use the org's thumb drives...
EJ: and would explore the implications of what this dongle would mean for humanity
EJ: presumably, if thumb drives are the modern-day dongle than something else is now an out-dated dongle
EJ: what of that?
X: thus the introduction would include a discussion of the out dated dongle
X: and the path the org and the world took to getting to the modern day version
EJ: and its potential for transitioning from dongle to dwinklezorp
X: also, it would define dongle
EJ: naturally
EJ: but in terms of what it meant for the organization
X: agreed
EJ: and how they could consumerize the thumb drives to be a more efficient dongle
X: there would also be an invitation to discuss the concepts at a brown bag lunch
X: because this subject should be discussed with staff at large
EJ: totally! because the thumb drives have potential but it's not determined that they will for sure the the new dongle
X: right
EJ: there might be other dongle-esque prospects out there
X: the org needs some sort of way to poll the drives efficiency with staffers
X: particularly with regard to dongle issues

oh, and we won 10-6

2007-04-13T13:00:00.000Z

'Tis been far too long since I woke up with a crust of last night's beer on my eyebrows.

Kickball, I've missed you so.

kickin' it in the chill out tent

2007-04-11T21:13:00.000Z

Even if Mother Nature hasn't gotten the memo yet, warm weather is not terribly far away. And what does warm weather mean?

Concerts! Alternatively known as "an open drain on my financial resources that is oh! so very worth it."

So far this spring I've seen Scissor Sisters, Kaiser Chiefs with the Walkmen and Of Montreal. I have tickets for Peter Bjorn and John, Bloc Party (with good enough seats that I almost don't mind it's at DAR, where rock goes to waft into the rafters and die), A Prairie Home Companion, stage seats for Spring Awakening in New York (which I would argue is a rock concert with more sex and Germanic schoolboy costumes). There are rumblings of a Decemberists showing with the Baltimore Philharmonic, which I will be first in line for. I missed out on Arcade Fire tickets and am a little bummed about it, but 1) it's at DAR, and I believe my feelings on that venue have been established and 2) I saw them when I was backpacking through Amsterdam in winter 2005, the kind of experience that cannot really be topped or replicated even with the best contributing efforts of the pharmaceutical industry. Although Neon Bible is a really excellent album. But alas.

There are also lots of outings from local bands, starting with the Six Points Music Festival, whose press preview I'll be attending tonight. My favorite DC band The Roosevelt will be playing at DC9 on Saturday April 20th with Two If By Sea and Alfonso Velez of the departed Monopoli. Full disclosure: a member of The Roosevelt is a good friend and in fact once helped me move AND get a job, which means I owe him a life debt. But I actually really, really enjoy their music. As do the Going Out Gurus. I'll also be checking out my friends in The Known Unknowns at DC9 on April 16th, because they've been endorsed by Donald Rumsfeld. Seriously.

So it's time to decide what else to see, and I'm having a tough time. Ben Folds is coming to Verizon Center, which is awesome, but he's coming in support of John Mayer which is not awesome. I just don't know if I can make myself pay good money to see John Mayer in concert. I hated his last two albums, I hate how he's turning into a Jack White lookalike who still plays Jason Mraz music, and whatever good will he won with both his admittedly amusing blog and his request for a Dundie award went out the window once he hooked up with Jessica Simpson. Plus, I already paid money to see John Mayer when I was nineteen and I kind of have this personal policy of not doing things I did when I was nineteen. Trust me, everyone is better off that way.

It's always frustrating when a band you like is opening for a band you either don't want to see, or worse, actively detest. I'm in a similar situation with the Fray/OK Go/Mae concert at Merriweather this summer. I really, really love Mae's album The Everglow and find that OK Go video really charming even though I've seen it more times than my mom has seen Terms of Endearment (I'm not going to link to the video. Really. You know it. Don't be lazy). But I'm so very sick of The Fray and their constant whining about How To Save A Life gunking up my morning radio, endless commercials and I swear, every single goddamn episode of Scrubs. We get, you're doctors. Who like gentle indie pop. And save lives. Connection established.

Jenny and I have discussed going to Bonnaroo, where the lineup looks fantastic and from which we'd be lucky to escape with only epic hangovers and a merciless case of BO. Four days of concerts? Camping? With my little sister? And fifty thousand rednecks and hippies? In an open field in Tennessee in July? That wouldn't be a music festival, it'd be Survivor: Pretentious Indie Snobs.

However, the lineup for Lollapalooza came out today-- and minus Ben Folds and Bloc Party, it's pretty much every band I want to see or have already seen and loved enough to see again. Plus it's in Chicago, where Jenny lives and more importantly, where I can stay for free. Now, to try to get off a day in August.

What concerts are you seeing this summer? Any recommendations?

an open letter to don imus

2007-04-10T17:51:00.000Z

Dear Don Imus,

I had a friend growing up who absolutely refused to apologize for anything. If she hurt someone's feelings, which happened quite frequently as she was one of those teenage girls who confused "it's best to be honest" with "it's best to be a total fucking bitch" she would respond to a crumpled face or even tears with an "I'm sorry you feel that way." To this day, that phrase still makes me seethe. It's not an apology, it's a retort. It gets no one anywhere, designed to assert superiority on the part of the one who issues it while not ceding any territory that a real apology, one that was sincere and paired with a promise to be better, would include. She hurled half-baked non-apologies, saying the correct words while rolling her eyes. Like, geez, why do you have to be so sensitive? It's not my fault you can't handle how it is.

I've thought of her a lot this week watching you make the obligatory Tour of Shame and Regret that is so common these days. One week it's an actor with a big mouth who thinks that epithets about gay people are okay to use both at the workplace and at the Golden Globes or an actor who blames his anti-Semitism on his drinking problem, the next it's some college kid who writes a column suggesting that women actually like getting raped and it's the only way that "ugly" girls will ever have sex.

In all these cases, everyone involved has mixed their apologies with all sorts of qualifying statements, cheapening whatever nugget of genuine regret was present. How can you truly be sorry if you're trying to defend your actions? Being defensive is just asking for a lesser punishment. Time off for good, or at least not-malevolent intentions. You're not sorry for what you did. You don't think that what you said was bad. Just like them, you're sorry you got caught being a jerk. You're sorry you're paying for it now. Whole different ballgame.

You semi-apologist types make excuses are ranging from "it was satire" (no it wasn't, satire is ridiculing a subject with the goal of shaming it into reform, not being a sophomoric little prick who uses his college newspaper to make rape jokes) to trying to forget the whole thing ever happened (not a good idea when you then repeat the word in question at a press conference). But your response has got to be my favorite of the bunch.

Now, I don't watch or listen to your show and so my understanding of it has come entirely from reports after the incident in which you so charmingly referred to the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos." Way to strike a blow for freedom of the press there, Don. I'm sure that your right to name-call a group of hardworking black female athletes was truly what the founding fathers had in mind when they created the First Amendment.

But you know what? Fine. I don't care.

This may be somewhat shocking, as I am somewhat hard to pull off my soapbox, but I'm not feeling rowdy about this just because you made a bigoted remark. Hell, you've been doing that for years. You spent the 90s calling Gwen Ifill "a cleaning lady" and referred to a black sportswriter at the Times as "a quota hire." So classy. But no one watches or listens to you because they expect classiness, or well-reasoned, thought-provoking dialogue. You're around because of your entertainment value, because you get people's knickers in a twist. You're around for the same reason I read Ann Coulter columns online when I'm feeling lazy-- to light a fire under my ass. I may not agree with anything she or you or they say, but I respect your right to exist.

But you should know, you're playing this whole thing all wrong and practically guaranteeing it's not going away any time soon. For one thing, your remarks were clearly no isolated incident of verbal diarrhea or pathetic attempt at a joke. The guys above were undeniably stupid and small-minded, but at least were smart enough not to go on the record with how bad at life they are. You've got a rap sheet for dumb moves, Don, and three strikes, you're out.

It's really hilarious to see you frantically thumbing through the Tour of Shame and Regret Playbook, looking for anything but anything that will get you out of this mess. To you, it's not about apologizing or regret, it's about making the situation go away as quickly as possible. But there have been enough of these incidents in recent memory that you should know that trying to explain it away will only get you in a bigger mess.

Let's examine some of your moves so far, shall we?

Deny and call everyone else pussies: Don, you can still get away with doing that when you make offensive remarks about women in general (an infantilizing line of reasoning that makes me steam, but that's another soapbox). I'll break this down for you, though it will undoubtedly get me into some trouble: you can't do that with African-Americans, Jews, sexual assault victims or, increasingly, gays and lesbians. Any time that a people have been actively persecuted or discriminated against in recent memory, it gets exponentially harder to blame your bigoted comments on public sensitivity. There is probably a mathematical formula to this. Someone should figure it out so crotch rot like you has a barometer for trash-talking.

The "it's a joke gone wrong" defense: 1) Jokes are supposed to be funny. 2) You are not funny. 3) White men don't get to make jokes about private citizens who are black women on nationally syndicated radio shows. You go ahead and stew about the injustice of that in your Westport, Connecticut mansion.

Go on Al Sharpton's radio show and use the phrase "you people" in reference to the black community: I have not the words. It is 2007. You don't DO that. If you don't get this, I can't help you.

On the same radio show, make bizarre claims about your funding for sickle cell anemia and the fact that ten percent of campers at your ranch are black: How is this not the old "I have black friends so I can't be a racist" argument?

In a hilariously misguided effort to dig yourself out of an ever-deepening hole, suggest "we ought to have a black person on the show every single day to add some perspective:" Well, sure, why not? After all, all black people speak with one voice and as A Black Person, never as individuals with their own opinions and qualifications and experiences. Every black person is just A Black Person. FLAWLESS plan, Don.

And now you want to meet with the Rutgers women's basketball team: Don, please, please, PLEASE take a lesson from Isaiah Washington and do not say something like "I'm sorry I called you nappy-headed hos. You're not nappy-headed. Or hos. You have heads, but they are not nappy. Some of you may have sex but you're not hos. Nappy. Hos. Heads. Nappy nappy nappy hos nappy heads. BLACK!"

You should have apologized. You should have been a man and not tried to weasel your way out of a situation you created. You should have said right away "I am so sorry. I said a stupid, terrible thing. I don't know why I said it. There is no excuse, no reason that would qualify or justify my behavior." Then you should have gone off the air for the rest of the day, met privately with the Rutgers women's team and told them the same thing away from the microphones and cameras. Then, instead of being in danger of losing your job, people would be saying things like "Look, that grizzled old man has a soft spot after all. He's trying to change. I respect that." People would feel tenderness for you and forget about their contempt for what you said.

Okay, so after all of this: I think you should be fired.

I think you should be fired not because you said something stupid and racist, but because you don't get it. You're out there running around hollering about how you're a good person, but you don't get that this whole fuss isn't about whether you're a good person. You may be sweetness and sunshine and puppy dogs and Katie Couric before she left the Today Show, but what you are NOT is a good radio host. Whether you're a good person is irrelevant. Your job is to say things on the radio and you're really, really bad at it! You make stupid comments that offer no entertainment or educational value and even though there have been a MILLION examples of how NOT to conduct The Tour of Shame and Regret, you screw up at every turn! You're an embarrassment, Don. No one cares if you're a racist deep down inside, they just care about whether or not you express your racism ON THE AIR. YOU WORK IN THE MEDIA-ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX, DON. If you have not by now grasped that it is all about appearances, then you really have no business keeping your job longer than it takes CBS to chuck you and your cowboy hat on the street.

With all good intentions, because if you don't mean it to be cruel then you can say whatever the hell you want and screw anyone who can't deal with it,

EJ

this our hymn of grateful praise

2007-04-08T23:57:00.000Z

This year was Year Seven of doing Greek Easter in the Burbs. Catholics say that seven years old is the age of reason, the age of distinguishing right from wrong and at which a person is held responsible for his or her actions. Well, this WASP has determined that her action will forever be to pursue wine and lamb and spanikopita over ham and frighteningly enormous Easter bunnies any old day. Luckily, the little girls in floaty dresses and frilly socks were all in hiding this year, all religions equally doomed by the unfortunate cold snap.

Greek Easter in the Burbs has been going on at my dear, dear friend Christina's house ever since freshman year of college and it serves as somewhat of a milestone in my mind. I still remember after our first year when I wrote an overly flowery thank-you note to her parents, who upon receiving it called Christina to make sure "Honey, your friend EJ? Is she okay?" And I had to explain to them how cool it was to me that after growing up in a college town, where my parents adopted students who worked for my mother and had them over for home-cooked meals and how as a kid I always looked up to these impossibly cool grown-up kids, that now, I got to BE one of those cool college kids who gets to go to a holiday meal at someone else's house! So yes, I'm fine, but thank you for asking. It's always a marvelous time with huge amounts of wine and food and affectionate conversations with her parents and her Nana, a wonderfully classy lady who is the kind of dame I hope to be in my twilight years.

I admit, I felt a little guilty when I woke up at 11:30 this morning and knew I'd missed church. If there is any time that a lapsed Christian like me should go to church it's Easter, with the brass orchestras and gentle sermons tailored to the inevitably large crowds. I like the religious part of Easter but the aftermath creeps me out a bit. We never did Easter very big in my family and I detest both ham and anthropomorphic rodents. The Greeks do an Easter I can get behind-- a highly esoteric and tradition-bound ceremony followed by getting drunk with close family and friends. And the hitting of the eggs, of course. Everyone takes a red-dyed egg and smacks them end to end with a neighbor, and the last person with an un-cracked egg gets good luck for a year. Kat won this year, and since she's getting married in five weeks it could not have gone to a better person.

There is a part of me that knows that Easter is about the resurrection of Christ and that part of me just aches that it cannot enthusiastically embrace the idea of a miracle. But old friends and moussaka and good wishes for the year ahead? Everyday or holy day, sign me up.

a room without books is like a body without a soul - cicero

2007-04-03T03:08:00.000Z

Half of my clothes are still packed and my den is exploding with old 2000 campaign t-shirts and notebooks from college. My TV is sitting on the floor and the washer is officially dead, soon to be carted away by the good people of Sears Silver Spring.

But I am completely and totally at home because my bookshelves are built and my books are unpacked.

You may have thought I was joking about the seventeen boxes of books. I wasn't. This is maybe a third of them:

It's a little ridiculous, I know. But it can't be helped. These books are like old friends, and displayed on these shelves with photos and totchkes, they're practically telling my autobiography. There's the script of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that was a present from Tim, the scruffily cute guy I worked with at an independent bookstore the summer before college. My father's copy of Atlas Shrugged that he gave me for my 21st birthday. The ratty paperback Vanity Fair I read on trains through Italy and Austria.

The four Wallace Stegner books that Jim at Capitol Hill Books disgustedly shoved into my arms when I confessed to him, red-faced, that I'd never read any Stegner. The dog-eared copy of High Fidelity I keep prominently displayed as a reminder that I need to be done with dating men who say things like "How can you like Art Garfunkel and Solomon Burke? It's like saying you support the Israelis and the Palestinians!" All six Harry Potters and the collected works of both David Sedaris and David Ives.

Some people think books are nothing more than the sum of their parts-- paper, glue, ink-- and some people think that they are mere conduits for the stories they contain. I fall somewhere in the middle because to me a tangible book is inextricably linked with my memory of acquiring it and/or reading it. It's not that I don't love the stories being told, mostly because I'm ruthless both with what I read and what I keep in my home, but it's more than that. I love being able to get lost in nostalgia just by looking at my bookshelf, swept away in recollections of where I was and what I was doing when I first encountered that story.

Loving reading and loving books are two linked but very distinct traits. If I were a true literary snob I would hide my guilty pleasure literature behind copies of The Republic and the Herodotus and Thucydides that was the bane of my undergrad historiography seminar but which makes me look all super-academic and erudite, like a person who tosses out bon mots like sneezes and can tell a fifty dollar bottle of wine from a two hundred dollar bottle of wine. I am not that person. I am a person with two copies of Bridget Jones' Diary (both presents from girlfriends, so it's not like I could give one away!) and the tattered trade paperback edition of Circle of Friends that I picked up in Dublin and read in one afternoon lolling on St. Stephen's Green, nursing a vicious St. Patricks' Day hangover.

A space always feels temporary, even a little strange and scary, until I have my books unpacked and displayed. I can unpack my clothes and fill the kitchen cabinets and hang pictures but it's not until I can look up and let my eyes wander along the cracked spines and the pristine jackets alike that I know I am at home.

the joys and woes of second wave gentrifiers

2007-04-01T15:34:00.000Z

I have some earth-shatteringly shocking news that is going to TOTALLY ROCK YOUR SOCKS.

Moving. Blows.

And frankly, because my washing machine started leaking all over my hardwood floors TWO HOURS AFTER I MOVED IN, I am not very big on homeownership right now.

I am, however, very, very big on the following things:

- The huge flat screen TV I got off Craigslist for fifty bucks, and the good people at the CW who someone knew at 11:00 last night that I badly needed to have Wet Hot American Summer playing in the background while I bailed out the washing machine with a tupperware container.

- The fact that two other people on my floor also have cats and that apparently this is a "no pets building" the same way that Ryan Seacrest is a symbol of heterosexual virility.

- Friends who help with moving when there is absolutely nothing in it for them save the joy of keeping me sane.

- The enormous bucket of Cluck U chicken and biscuits currently sitting on my kitchen counter between two boxes, one marked "Booze" and the other marked "Non-tacky Picture Frames."

week's end in the city

2007-03-27T03:59:00.000Z

For my last Sunday night as a resident of the Hill I reversed my usual jogging route, skipping Lincoln Park and RFK in favor of the more traditional touristy sights. Chasing the sunset down Constitution, I rounded the corner onto the Capitol grounds as Bloc Party vibrated through my earbuds.

There is a wall that runs right through me
Just like the city, I will never be joined

My ponytail was coming loose and I jogged down some steps to my right, thinking they would empty out at a bench where I could stretch and re-tie my hair. To my surprise, the bushes on either side of me opened up to show a small rocky cupola, almost like a chapel, hollowed out into the lawn. I'd seen these stone pits before, of course, but they'd always been boarded up and closed off to the public. Now the gates hung open as I stepped into the cool stone circle, setting my iPod down on the edge of the long-dormant fountain in the center so I could sweep back my sweaty hair.

I've lived on Capitol Hill for three years and never once been inside this nook. Never before had I stretched my sore calves as I did now, using the worn stone benches as a barre and grabbing at gnarled branch of ivy as I lost my balance. How many more of these nooks are there in this neighborhood? How much am I leaving undiscovered? What possible memories am I scrapping before they're experienced?

Standing in the dying light creeping over the edge of the stones, I rolled my eyes at my own melodramatic wistfulness. You're moving to Columbia Heights, EJ. Not Guam. Chill out. You'll be back.

Muscles stretched and melancholy achieved, I walked up and out of the stone pit to catch the last vestiges of the sunset. The sun had the nerve to be setting over Pennsylvania Avenue and was therefore slightly off-center from the line of the Mall as I plopped down on the Capitol steps, not particularly caring that I was inserting myself into several tourists' vacation photos. If it were a perfect last Sunday sunset on the Hill, I thought, then the sun would be evenly backlighting the Washington Monument and the sky would be even more brilliantly pink than it already is. And Rosslyn wouldn't be there to junk up the view. And that woman with the fanny pack wouldn't be glaring at me because I'm blocking her shot of the Dome. It's not like I go to her backyard in Peoria and give her the stank eye when she's going about her day.

I pulled my bare legs to my chest and hugged my arms around them like a little girl. It was still too cold to be jogging in shorts, but all of my sweatpants were shoveled into garbage bags, readied for the big move this weekend. Perhaps not the most efficient way of packing, but then, it is only a mile away.

After I move it'll be a bummer being slightly further away from some friends, but I'll have fun being a lot closer to others. I'll own a home, but my monthly bills will be lower than when I rented. I'll still be the girl who reads five books at the same time and doesn't know her gimlet limits and cooks overelaborate meals with a lot of garlic and who is not terribly good at keeping her unsolicited opinions to herself. I'll still shop and brunch at Eastern Market and watch couples wandering in and out of creaky brick townhouses and daydream about the future. Nothing will really change that much.

I
I have decided
At twenty-five
Something must change

The sun and the tourists were both gone by the time I peeled myself from the marble floor and trotted off towards home. Home for the next five days, anyway.

to a deeeeluxe apartment

2007-03-26T14:13:00.000Z

It's official: I've become completely obsessed with furniture. As a part of the Move That Ate Capitol Hill I'm selling most of my old post-college Ikea stuff and am spending way too much time browsing Decor8, wishing I could afford to have her fly to DC and design my entire life. I actually had a dream about pintucked back sofas last night. I spent four hours watching Jonathan Rhys-Meyers storm around Tudor England half-naked and scowling on Showtime and then I dreamt about a couch. Clearly, I need professional help. I am a woman possessed. By possessions.

Does anyone need bookcases? Because I have four of them. All are the white particle board ones from Ikea that everyone buys at some point in their early twenties. I'm selling two of the tall ones with six shelves ($30 each) and two of the small ones with 3 shelves ($15 each). They're all in great shape despite holding seventeen boxes worth of books over the last three years.* I'm also selling a coffee table. It's a 3 x 3 foot white square with slots for storage. Email me at ejtakeslife at gmail dot com if you're at all interested and I'll happily send you a photo. I want this big white furniture out of my soon-to-be-ex apartment.

Plus, if you buy my bookcases and coffee table, I promise to write something substantive. Until I get rid of my big honking (yet perfectly functional!) white furniture and work up the nerve to buy this couch and this rug, you're not going to get a whole lot of decent prose from me.

*When I finally finished packing my books last night, I started to count the boxes and had to stop at seventeen. So that's where my money has been going all these years.

sprung

2007-03-22T18:35:00.000Z

I just spent lunch break in the park by my office, and can safely say that people are greeting the arrival of spring with perhaps a bit more enthusiasm than is wise.

Ladies, it is not yet warm enough to justify sunbathing. Lying on the grass basking in the sunshine, sure. But nothing involving bikini tops. It is still March. You have plenty of time to develop malignant melanomas and handbag skin. Pace yourselves.

Gentlemen, for the sweet love of Jesus, if you are going to wear man-sandals you need to do something about your feet. They've been safely ensconsed in wingtips and sneakers and boots for months and are not ready to be thrust, ungroomed, upon an unsuspecting public. A pedicure is not mandatory, but at least clip your gnarly toenails. They should not hang over the edge of your Birkenstocks.

And to the one girl on the corner of 19th and Penn: I know it's tough to plan outfits for days with a thirty-five-degree temperature span. One is always a little too cold or a little too warm. I feel your pain, I do. But donning flipflops, a floaty linen circle skirt over bare legs, a turtleneck sweater and a wool scarf is not the way to tackle this problem. Then again, you probably don't need me to tell you this; you already looked really uncomfortable. And a little bag-ladyish.

ejtakeslife NOT best writer in DC; CRIES into pillow ALL night

2007-03-21T21:49:00.000Z

I was dimly aware of this site someone was running about the Best/Worst/Manliest/Stupidest/Sexiest/Furriest Chest Hair DC Blogs. Another blogger mentioned it in passing when we were hanging out a while ago, and my reaction to its existence was similar to my reaction to American Idol: wow, that is a lot of time and emotion invested in something completely manufactured. But hey, whatever makes people happy.

I naturally assumed that since I don't really write about my dating habits, trash-talk other bloggers or at any time compare my life to an episode of Sex and the City, I would probably fly under the radar of whoever was running this thing. So imagine my surprise when I checked my Technorati the other day to find out that the mysterious overlord of this site had "nominated" me for "Best DC Blog by Best DC Writer." I'll admit, even knowing that the criteria for such an award seemed to be 1) be on the DCBlogs roll and 2) be subjected to name-calling in the comments section less than the other "nominees," I was rather charmed. Someone out there reads this stuff? And likes this stuff? And cares that my dad is healthy and my cat is safe? How adorable! It's like knowing people actually read my family's Christmas newsletter and don't roll their eyes and throw up!

Further proving my maxim that the things designed to improve our lives inevitably complicate them more, I started regularly checking the comments, waiting for the inevitable shit-talking to begin. I made it through a whole day or so ducking the mud being slung about. And I really have to ask something of the Internet here: where do you people buy your energy supplements? Do they carry your pills at GNC or do you have to get them through a doctor? Because whatever you're on, I'd like some of it. If the passion shown in your commenting exists in pill form, I could have enough energy to knock down the Great Wall of China with my bare hands and then rebuild it with Popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. Which has totally been a goal of mine since childhood

Eventually I was presented with with such well-reasoned, thought-provoking criticisms of my writing as "Dump EJ," "Dump EJ" and "Dump EJ and his life" and my pathetic attempts at expressing myself fell victim to the smarter, wittier souls who troll this fair Internet of ours. I was unceremoniously sacked from the competition this afternoon and have spent every moment since then heaving with sobs. Why, God? Why put me into this world, give me a brain to process thought and hands to type, only to limit my gifts and make me fall so far short of everyone else? Where is thy decency, you cruel shaper of fate?!

As I attempt to collect myself, I can only hope that I'll can draw strength from addressing a few of the constructive criticisms so helpfully suggested by some commenters. Behold:

Drop EJ Takes Life no one cares about EJ or the the life he took And suicide is bad.

No argument at all there, friend. Suicide is a terrible, terrible thing. Nowhere in almost two years of writing this blog have I ever advocated taking one's own life. I'm saving that for Year 3, of course. However, when you suggest that "no one cares about EJ," are you not devaluing my OWN life? Isn't "no one cares" really the same thing as "the world wouldn't miss you and you should really just pack it in?" Aren't you trying to encourage ME to perform the very same act that you have just labeled "bad?" Perhaps you should practice what you preach. And start using punctuation.

EJ is a sophomoric sadist and I’d appreciate her removal from the list. She’s must to young to play with the big boys. Cut her!

Too young? You rock! Thank you so much! Here I have been all worried that I was getting prematurely old by buying a condo and deleting that guy I hooked up with last fall from my cell phone so I'd have room for my mortgage broker and spending the night before my birthday drinking martinis at the Kennedy Center instead of playing flipcup in a glorified frathouse basement. And then you came along to calm my fears! You are so sweet!

I do take slight issue with the labeling me as a "sadist." It's been simply months since I drove spikes into someone's flesh for pleasure, and so that term is somewhat dated. These days, I'm into plushies.

Do it. Dump EJ and his life from the list.

This one hurts. Of course I'm a terrible writer and a terrible human being and completely stupid and a waste of time, but I'm not a dude. I'm a girl. Woman. Female. She.

These are men:

This is me:

I realize that there is a tremendous resemblance between me and the above individuals, particularly Coolio, but I am a girl... woman... whatever noun female-gendered people my age are supposed to use. Yes, I understand that because I socked away fourteen Guinnesses in four hours on Saturday and am currently second in my March Madness bracket of 24 entries, the male gender might want to claim me as one of their own. But alas, biology has spoken and declared me to be a chick. Sorry.

Lose EJ. I could never support someone who names their blog after a Muppet film.

This is so tragic, it's practically Shakespearean. Someone FINALLY gets the title of my blog and yet simultaneously rejects me for it! Yes, EJ Takes Life is in part named after one of my very favorite movies ever, the brilliant Muppets Take Manhattan. I didn't name it EJ Takes DC because I started it right after my backpacking trip (which naturally begat EJ Takes Europe) and frankly, I didn't see myself sticking around here that long. But the best film of the best troupe of singing, dancing puppets ever to put on a Broadway show AND put pigs in space? Did you not watch the Muppets, friend? Did you not have an American childhood? Have you no sense of wonder, or appreciation for cameos by B-list mid-80s celebrities?!

In the end, as I attempt to scrape up what is left of my dignity, hope and dreams, I can take comfort in the message below:

Bloggers... is bloggers.

mama bear

2007-03-20T01:53:00.000Z

Jenny and I arrived home tonight after a day of movies, Spy Museum, drinks and dinner with friends to find my front door wide open.

To be entirely fair, we were given a bit of warning. I got a voicemail from my leasing agent that they were showing my apartment to a prospective tennant tonight, and then another message that, um, the front door was, um, having problems locking. But that, um, it was shut and if I was really worried, um, here's the number for the emergency repair line.

To clarify: the leasing agent himself did not call the emergency repair line. He left the number for me, not knowing where I was, on my voicemail. And made it sound as though the lock was perhaps jammed or maybe there was a penny stuck in the frame, instead of what was actually going on.

As we stepped in the front yard and and pushed the rusting gate aside, I saw through the cobwebby dark that my iron gate was shut but that the warped wooden door was waving open in the breeze, leaving a gap of at least a foot. "Oh my God," I yelled, scrambling to open the gate. "Sadie?! Sadie, honey?! Baby girl?!" Jenny ran into my bedroom and started turning on lights, calling for the cat as she looked under the bed and I stood tree-like in the kitchen, livid and terrified at the same time. I heard traffic whizzing by on the street through the open door. It didn't even occur to me to be thinking about either of the MacBooks sitting on my coffee table or the pearls my grandfather gave me for high school graduation.

I suddenly heard an indignant "mew!" from behind me and whirled around to see Sadie darting through the bars of my iron gate. Much cuddling followed, and not a few tears on my part. Once I calmed down enough to stop apologizing to her, and once Jenny had poured me a glass of Bailey's, came the anger. Anger that only exploded over when I looked at the door more closely to see that in the nine hours since Jenny and I had left the house, the wood between the deadbolt and the knob had somehow completely split down the middle.

It absolutely turns my stomach that someone would be okay with just leaving someone's door open, especially when that person has a stated responsibility for the property. Especially when he would try to cover his ass by leaving a voicemail with an emergency number for the tenant to call when 1) she has no idea what the damage actually is and 2) he has no idea when she will receive the message or return to the property.

What absolutely causes my blood to boil over the edge of the pot of anger and onto the stove of screaming, righteous indignation (I should not be allowed to metaphor while furious) is that he did not give a second thought to the fact that I had a pet living in the property. That as far as he was concerned, it was fine to gamble that my cat would just not go outside if the door happened to blow open. And that, even if she did, well, she'd probably come back. Right?

And yes, she did come back. She came back when I called her because she is infinitely smarter than the idiotic, irresponsible sack of jackassery that didn't care that she might escape in the first place. The one that didn't notice that the DOOR HAD SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE.

The one who allowed a situation where myself, my little sister and my cat now have to sleep in a basement apartment with a broken door because no carpenters are available to come out at 10:30 on a Monday night.

Of course, he was also stupid enough to give me his cell phone number when he left that second voicemail.

Now, I'm not generally a vindictive person, nor am I the type of soul who relishes it when someone gives me bad service and I can rub their nose in it. Why, our waitress at dinner tonight kept touching various members of our party and saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry" over and over. I tipped her 22 percent. With most people, I figure that if their lives are bad enough that they're going to take it out on me, a complete stranger, then their lives are tough enough without me stiffing them or yelling at them or making them feel bad about who they are or what they do.

It's also rare that i get angry just for the sake of making my anger known. I find myself more likely to do this as I get older and become more aware of the fact that because I'm a single and generally pretty polite woman, people are less likely to take me seriously or be afraid of what will happen if they don't make me happy. When I get angry it's usually with the goal of getting something done, to achieve a pre-defined end. I'm not terribly good at hearing "no" as in "no, there's nothing we can do about this now." There is something that can be done in almost every bad situation, and "no" usually means "I don't want to" or "that would be a huge pain," neither of which is the same as "there is no way this can be done."

However, I make the rare exception to this generally positive approach to life. This is exponentially more likely to happen the more that you mess with my people. I have a tremendous mama bear side that will spring to life when you fuck with the things and people I love. And God help you if I find out that you were callous with my personal safety and that of those who I love, because not only will I hold you responsible but I will make you feel so awfully, personally responsible for all that bad things that COULD have happened that they might as well HAVE happened, so great will your guilt be.

Two phone calls to him, one phone call to his director and one phone call to the head of the agency later, and this guy is probably regretting not spending the evening sitting cross-legged in my front yard watching for a whisker poking out the front door.

Of course, I am still left wishing that Jenny and I had chosen another movie besides Zodiac.

we're the mcfitzwilliams

2007-03-18T02:30:00.000Z

It is really disturbing how well my sister and I are able to recite along with The Brady Bunch Movie after four hours of drinking Guinness at the Dubliner.

"She has every right to be mad. They are her socks."

"But why does MARCIA get all the socks?"

drag poetry

2007-03-14T13:41:00.000Z

This is a bingo card.

This is the drag queen that gave us a bingo card.

This is the DVD of Back from Iraq that the drag queen gave us when we got Bingo! on a bingo card.

This is the look of utter "Omigod you guys!" horror at the big screen TV showing a guy eating another guy's ass on top of the American flag on the DVD of Back from Iraq that the drag queen gave us when we got a Bingo! on a bingo card.

These are the boobs the drunk girl at the table behind us showed to the entire bar as we looked in utter "Omigod you guys!" horror at the big screen TV showing a guy eating another guy's ass on top of the American flag on the DVD of Back from Iraq that the drag queen gave us when we got a Bingo! on a bingo card.

This is the hot straight guy that Kim picked up at Drag Bingo Night because she has MAD GAME while the rest of us laughed at the boobs the drunk girl at the table behind us showed to the entire bar as we gawped in utter "Omigod you guys!" horror at the big screen TV showing a guy eating another guy's ass on top of the American flag on the DVD of Back from Iraq that the drag queen gave us when we got a Bingo! on a bingo card.

lost in translation

2007-03-09T20:20:00.000Z

Okay, Hollywood. We need to talk.

It's really great that you are finally understanding that the BBC does television a lot better than you all do. No one expected that the American version of The Office would rock so much (perhaps even harder than the original), and you are to be applauded for not only for not screwing up a terrific concept, but both improving on it and giving me John Krasinski. If I have not said it before, thanks for that part especially.

However.

I read today that ABC is doing a pilot called Football Wives, clearly based on the delicious British series Footballers' Wive$ and its spinoff, Footballers Wive$: Extra Time. I have sung hosannas to that show on many occasions and there is no guiltier pleasure for me than watching Tanya Turner swish her severe bob or Jason leer over everything with breasts or making rude comments about wussy-ass Donna's awful teeth. Granted, I haven't been as able to get into Extra Time, but as far as I know those characters have yet to bear any hermaphrodite babies or throw Snow White-themed weddings featuring a wedding party composed entirely of little people dressed in breeches. Kids today just don't respect the example of their elders. Elders who are, in any language, fucking awesome:

Anyways, Hollywood, I have a huge problem with your developing this new, weakened adaptation. Exporting a sitcom of mild depression and workplace misery onto America television is not a huge problem, but translating soaps is fraught with peril (much like the unholy extramarital union of Donna and Salvatore Biagi, played by an actor so little affect he could best Hayden Christensen in the International Most Wooden Male pageant). We already have trashy daytime and nighttime soaps in America, and they are filled with impossibly scheming, beautiful men and the bitchy, be-sequined women who scratch them with acrylic nails because they caught the men nailing the babysitter. However, in Footballers' Wive$ we get to SEE him nailing the babysitter. In the bathroom stall of the local club. With full-frontal nudity. And when the wife finds out, first she snorts a big ol' load of coke from her acrylic pinky fingernail before she uses it to claw his eyes out.

Such scenarios obviously cannot happen in America because, unlike the heathen British who clearly want a nation full of sexually active deviant Satanists, America Cares About The Children. Which means our TV shows have no casual and unnecessary nudity, no explicit drug use, no sexual abuse of comatose piggish soccer club owners and (even though Jack Bauer can torture everyone with brown skin in order to save Los Angeles) no woman's breasts have ever caught on fire just for the sheer fun of it. In other words, Hollywood, your TV mostly sucks.

Hollywood, how can you possibly translate the trashabulous glory of Footballers Wive$ to suit the sexually puritanical standards of America, a country that is okay with suspending teenagers for daring to say the word "vagina" in front of other people, lo, the End of Days is nigh?! Tanya Turner practically says "vagina," usually in a less delicate manner, in every other sentence. Right before she'll choke a bitch out.

So I'm already pretty steaming mad over this, Hollywood, but do you know what REALLY frosts my cookies?

You cast James Van Der Beek in the Ian Walmsley role.

James Van Der "Ah. Don't want. Yer life." Beek.

Hollywood, do me a favor. Piss off, eh?

the power of the interwebs

2007-03-08T16:55:00.000Z

My Dad discovered Google last night.

Well, to be fair, he discovered the concept of Googling oneself last night. He was aware of the existence of Google before, but, lovable Luddite that he is, still insists on using Altavista and Ask Jeeves when he needs to search for something. And he also uses an abacus in restaurants to calculate tips. Okay, not that last one. But you get my point.

This magical discovery came about because my long-lost cousin emailed him out of the blue last week. To be more specific, the community theater group my family used to work with emailed him to say that someone had emailed them wondering if the name on their webpage happened to be his Uncle Steve and how one might get in touch with him today.

There's a whole other story to be told about this family member and that whole side of the family and that's why someday I'm going to sit down and write the whole damn thing because it's a Southern Gothic novel meets the Vietnam War and really, it needs to be committed to paper.

Family historical drama aside, my dad couldn't believe that the cousin had tracked him down. "I don't get it," he told me. "Our last two Christmas cards to them have come back return-to-sender. And how on Earth did he find me through the theater?"

"Well," I replied, "if he knew your name, and he knew you lived in Ann Arbor for a long time, that page probably came up when he Googled you. That's how I would try to find someone."

Sure enough, as we tried it over the phone, there it was: my father, playing a 1920s reporter in a community theater production of The Front Page was the first hit when you Googled his name and hometown. There was his full name and several pictures. Long-lost relatives found in five seconds.

"This is neat!" my dad exclaimed over the phone. "Tee-hee!" (Yes, my father says "tee-hee." It is so cute). "Look at that!"

"Dad, haven't you ever Googled yourself before?"

"Can I do that?"

"Sure! It's not like the Internet Police are going to show up and arrest you for being a curious narcissist. Everybody Googles themselves."

"Okay, so how do I do this?"

"Just type your name in the search engine. Oh, and use quotation marks around it."

"... Well, look at that! I'm an Australian rugby player! I'm a British dentist! I scored 34 points in a Finnish professional basketball game!"

"See, it's fun! I'm a photographer and write really awesome comic-strip art and work at Whaddaya Know?"

"... It's kind of sad when people who have our names lead more interesting lives than we do."

Oh, innocent father of mine. It's just one of the many ways the Internet disappoints us. I'll never tell him about my experiences in Match.comland.

the internet agrees that my last job was insane

2007-03-06T15:32:00.000Z

* Now with more contest! Check out the comments to learn more *

I realized this morning that I've been in my current job for over a year now. That's the longest I've held any job before. They don't appear to be firing me any time soon. They even appear to rather like me. I could get used to this. It's a tremendously pleasant change from my other postgrad jobs, both of which left me as such a quivering ball of neuroses and stress at the end of the day that I both developed ulcers and a raging hostility towards all aspects of contemporary American politics.

This morning I also learned that a conversation I submitted during my previous job is now the number two classic quote on www.overheardintheoffice.com. As in, of all the idiocy that has been documented on that site, all of the bored office drones voting on which is the most idiotic of them all found my experience to be the second jaw-droppingly, snorting-out-loud stupidest, most ridiculous conversation there.

WOW. That, even given my rather insane employment history, kind of stops me cold.

Dear Lord Baby Jesus, I am so grateful to be in my current job. A job where strangers on the internet do not react to my office goings-on with a collective "dude, that shit is fucked up."

And in case you were wondering, as of February 2006, Desmond Tutu's email address is the one thing Google can't help you find. Well, that and your SANITY if you're trapped in a job where your boss asks you to Google Desmond Tutu's email address.

exhausted/awesome

2007-03-05T21:30:00.000Z

I have transcended exhaustion and moved onto that blissful, slightly delirious stage that can only come the Monday after an epic weekend. An epic weekend that ended with trading shirts with the extremely queeny guy behind me in the middle of "Filthy/Gorgeous" at the Scissor Sisters concert. You'd think that at the tender age of twenty-five I'd still cling to a small loose thread of modesty, but you would be quite wrong. Besides, not counting the drummer and possibly of one of the roadies, there was not a single straight man in all of 9:30 Club last night.

I really can't say enough good things about a live Scissor Sisters show. Jake Shears is a ridiculously charismatic leading man and Ana Matronic last night was literally the most beautiful woman I think I've ever encountered. I spent a significant portion of the concert just gawping at her magnificent boobs. She is newest winner of the Angelina Jolie Memorial Women I'd Go Gay For Award.

I vaguely remembered seeing the Scissor Sisters at V Festival last fall, but I only caught their last three songs after running across the length of Pimlico following The Who's hour-plus set. Don't get me wrong, I love The Scissor Sisters, but seeing them after seeing The Who absolutely destroy the mainstage with their four decades of badassery was like getting the chance to sleep with Adam Brody right after getting sexed up by Brad Pitt. Any other chance you'd be salivating, but the timing and setting was all wrong and dulled what should have been a perfect experience.

Therefore, I was very glad to be able to see them headlining their own show. Particularly when it closed out a weekend involving reckless deployment of leggings, the (all-too-brief) return of Libby, a deeply vile drink involving both Peach Schnapps and Pop Rocks and five hours of revisionist Cold War historiography at Tryst over $4 pots of tea and bean salad.

Aren't I just the most precious little hipster?

boomshakalakalaka

2007-02-28T22:01:00.000Z

Going to work this morning, I had a seven-song iPod-on-Shuffle-mode streak that was so wonderful, so perfectly, serendipitously organized that it must be documented. Future generations of twentysomethings will study it in Hipster 101 as the ideal iPod Shuffle Songs Run. It's been over four hours now and I'm still grinning at its awesomeness.

Song #1: "Don't Feel Like Dancing," Scissor Sisters
Is there a better song to hear first thing in the morning, especially if you hate mornings in general and particularly this one because you were up all night reading declassified NSA memos as pertain to CIA involvement 1953 Iran coup? I'm incapable of listening to this song without wanting to strut and shake my ass, preferably both at the same time. Why the Scissor Sisters didn't blow up in the U.S. when this song came out, yet the Pussycat Dolls inexplicably continue to sell albums, is something I will never understand.

This song was also a great omen, as I was waiting to hear back about a Craigslist ticket for Sunday's sold-out show at 9:30 Club. When I got to work today I was greeted with an email saying that not only was the ticket mine, but I would be buying it at purchase price. Since tickets were going for a lot more than that, I can only conclude that whatever Divine Power has been watching out for me lately heard me humming along under my breath as I dance-walked down East Capitol and decided a reward was in order.

Song #2: "Delirious Love," Neil Diamond
I've been listening to this song obsessively lately, ever since seeing it in an episode of Scrubs. Its got everything a good pop song needs: a catchy tune with a bouncy run of notes, strummy guitar sliding and excellent lyrics that everyone can identify with:

"Neither one of us stopping to figure out
What the roll and the rockin' was all about
All we knew was that we couldn't get enough
You and me in the heat of delirious love"

Neil effing Diamond. God love him.

Song #3: "I Believe," Spring Awakening soundtrack

I wrote about this show when I first saw it in December, and can't possible say enough good things about the production and this album. Simplistically, it's a coming of age story set in 1891 Germany mixed with a rock concert. The songs, most of which could easily pass for stand-alone rock songs, serve as comment on the script and the action, very different from traditional musical theater where the songs advance the plot. One could easily imagine artists from Joni Mitchell to Fountains of Wayne performing individual songs in their own right. This song, which closes Act One and is performed as the two teenage leads lose their virginity, is my favorite moment in the show-- stylized and abstract but achingly beautiful and honest, framed by this beautiful gospel-inflected number.

And two "first-time" songs right in a row? What are the odds?

Song# 4: "Chips Ahoy" The Hold Steady
I defy anyone to listen to this song and not be singing along "Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!" by the end. It can't be done. I love this album and am beyond disappointed that I can't go to Bonnaroo to see them in action. Don't get me started on how dumb I was to turn down a free ticket to their show at Black Cat last November just because it was Thanksgiving and I was five states away. Wuss.

Song #5: "One Mint Julep," Ray Charles
If you've ever wondered "what does jazz organ sound like?" this song will provide the answer. And the answer is "spectacular."

In the aftermath of the Great iPod Meltdown of 2006, I ripped about 4,000 songs from my sister's iPod. She has... interesting taste in music. I'll give her credit for getting me into Rubyhorse and DeVotchKa, but I had to delete a lot of obscure showtunes and "comedy" from her library (my hatred of Dane Cook really deserves another post). I'm still discovering songs I've never heard even though they've been on my iPod for months. This cover from his greatest hits album was one of them, and it will be making more regular appearances-- it's very bossa nova and Quincy Jones-esque, perfect for having Alan Ginsberg over for some fondue in your shag-carpeted conversation pit. Love it.

Song #6: "Life is a Song," Patrick Park
Or as it will forever be known, "That Song from the Last Episode of The O.C." I haven't watched since the lesbian story arc, but thanks to this site I've been able to keep up with the music. I am completely that girl who hears a song on Grey's Anatomy and instantly tries to track it down and that site has dramatically trimmed my Googling, leaving time for important things like feeding my seventeen cats or cross-stitching affirmations on pillows.

Cliched associations aside, this is a good song. With simple acoustic guitar and a focus on the lyrics, it perfectly captures that slightly melancholy optimism that is adulthood. Accepting inevitabilities can be freeing, and this song reflects that simple message with quiet grace.

By now I was on the Metro barreling towards work and was crossing my fingers that the streak would continue. I rarely make it for even six consecutive songs, usually skipping past something I like but am not in the mood for or am really embarrassed I like and don't want anyone to hear me listening to (cough!soundtracktoBatBoy:TheMusical*cough!*) . Would the seventh song, the one I would listed to as I got off the Metro and walked into my office, thereby setting the tone for the rest of the day, be as good as the ones that preceded it?

Um. Yes.

BoomshakalakalakaboomshakalakalakaUHN!

seventy-two hours

2007-02-27T01:59:00.000Z

Things about the last three days that have been deeply awesome:

- Al Gore, Al Gore, Al Gore. I have adored him ever since I volunteered for his campaign my freshman year of college and if by some miracle he were to run again, I would quit my job and sell my condo and hand out leaflets on a street corner for him. And I hate people who hand out leaflets on corners. Watching him be the King of the Oscars last night was tremendously enjoyable and validating. I love everything about him. This deserves its own post. That post will be coming soon.

- Accidentally throwing back too many beers at happy hour on Friday with S and her friends, getting to exactly the stage of tipsiness that makes people feel not at all guilty about blowing sixty dollars on oysters and boulliabasse.

- Emma's potluck on Saturday (I made Thai veggie stir-fry) and hosting my own dinner party on Sunday (with gruyere chicken gratin, asparagus and dark chocolate fondue).

- Waking up at noon on Sunday to six inches of perfect fluffy snow and taking a break from shoveling to have a snowball fight with the kids cleaning the sidewalk across the street. Because throwing things at innocent children is totally what God intended with the whole "day of rest" thing.

- Ragging on the Oscar red carpet. Remember the episode of 90210 where Donna Martin dressed up as a mermaid for Halloween at the college party (also where Kelly Taylor taught us that if you wear black lace and a tight-lipped smile to a frat party then you are totally asking to get assaulted; wow, that show really advanced the feminist movement)? And remember how Donna hobbled around the entire time and couldn't really move because she was swathed into an insanely bejeweled and unflattering glittery number and her big ol' wig was just plopped on her head and kept flopping in the way? Well, Beyonce was the Armani version of that outfit at the Oscars last night.

I look at her and think HIPS. HIIIIIIIIPS. I'm fairly sure that's not what she was going for. But I'm so glad she did it, because nothing is more fun than wearing my glasses and ratty old jeans from high school, getting tipsy with a bunch of girlfriends and yelling rude things about highly groomed celebrities at the television. Oh, and snorting chardonnay through my nose when Ryan Seacrest said "there's a lot of Wang on the red carpet tonight!" It's class all the way at EJ's place.

Things about the last three days that are not so awesome:

- Putting on work pants this morning and being absolutely horrified at what seventy-two hours of eating like it was my last meal before execution has done to my own midsection.

- The continued presence of web sidebar ads for Open Water 2. If the DVD came out four days ago, why exactly is it still being splashed all over every trashy entertainment website I read? While I generally love anything having to do with Center Stage, including but not limited to pronouncing it "the BAH-lay," the Jamiroquai-heavy soundtrack and Peter Gallagher's eyebrows, there is something really creepy wound around Susan May Pratt's neck in that ad and I really don't want to constantly see her open-mouthed expression of utter terror on top of the squid's tentacle or whatever that thing is.

- So my new building has a no-pet policy. I have a pet. I have a little baby girl kitty who I adopted from an animal rescue group. Giving up Sadie is not an option, but neither can I give up my apartment for her. This is actually something fairly serious to me, certainly more so than unpleasant popup ads, and though there's no way Sadie is not making the move with me I'm nervous about the execution of sneaking her into my new home. Yes, I've been known to do things like quit my "dream" job and go be a homeless bum in Prague, but I'm a pretty rule-abiding person. Even though it appears to be a toothless policy-- it's not a co-op, so they can't kick me out-- starting my residency there by breaking said policy is hardly ideal.

- I'm really pretty sure that Helen Mirren is having better sex than me.

crushing hopes

2007-02-23T19:44:00.000Z

I can barely remember the last time I had a really good crush.

In the last year I've dabbled in dating, sex, lust, drama, romantic indifference, affection and love but can't recall a single genuine crush in the fray. There hasn't been an exciting stomach-flippy, giggle-inducing man in my life, however peripherally, in a sadly long time.

I came to this realization, in true tragic single girl form, watching TV last night and realizing that no one, but no one I have encountered in the last year has a grin that makes my knees buckle like John Krasinski or Jeffrey Dean Morgan can. Has the world-- and by "the world," I do mean the "quantity of crushable men in the greater District area"-- really decayed so much that I am more turned on by television than by a breathing, flesh and blood male?

The last crush I remember having was in the fall of 2005. He was a friend of a friend who introduced himself by asking who I lost my virginity to. He had one of those grins that tells you right away that he loves trouble, that this will be a battle of wills and that he gets off on being adversarial. It was all very Taming of the Shrew, with Thomas Pink instead of breeches. Running into him at bars, Nats games and parties in the months that followed felt exactly what a good crush should feel like-- all tingly and teasing, banter that practically crackled with electricity and rushing back to clusters of girlfriends to breathlessly report on the nonconversation. Never wondering if he'd hurt me or I'd get bored with him or if he'd get along with my friends, just enjoying flirting with the cute boy.

My high school philosophy teacher once told me "the kiss is always best just before it happens." Meaning that, the anticipation of something, the moment when you're on the brink of inevitable, is really the thing that makes it great. The actual event, however good, is always a slight letdown from whatever you had elevated it to in your mind.

Now, I rarely embrace my inner girly-girl. You will find very few books with covers featuring scrawly drawing of heels or shopping bags on my shelves. Pink makes me look bloated. I am the only girl I know who doesn't find Justin Timberlake particularly sexy (falsetto voices creep me out, okay? A man should not speak in a higher pitch than I do!). I generally think of myself as a woman, not a girl.

But this woman is due for some giggling and silliness and sexual brinkmanship. For some harcore flirting with a cute stranger accompanied by stupid after-the-fact grinning, the kind where my girlfriends say things like "you can't stop smiling!" And if a Jeffrey Dean Morgan lookalike would like to play the role of "Object of Crush," well, then, that'd just be the buttercream icing on the cupcake.

The crush: so hot for Spring 2007.

nesting with a twist

2007-02-21T21:57:00.000Z

Now that the contract is signed, the financial matters are all squigged away and I've set a date for closing, I can get on the real fun of finally being a homeowner:

Decorating!

I'm a nester, and the way my home looks and feels is incredibly important to me. However, I'm not a terribly patient person and my interior design ethos thus far has been "OOH! Shiny! Colorful! Me want!" I'm also unable to commit to a color palate and as a result, my bedspread, runner carpet, dishes and soap dispenser all have a similar bright multi-stripe pattern that looks great but admittedly there is a lot going on. Looking at a rug probably shouldn't be that exhausting.

Since deciding to buy I've been allowing myself to peruse Craigslist for the items I know I'll definitely need (futon, bigger TV) and will probably wind up getting (new dressers and bookcases). Luckily my seller has great taste in paint colors and except for the burnt-sienna kitchen (which is either going to become pale lime or soft yellow, I haven't decided) I won't need to change much of what she's already done.

A brief post-college stint working at Restoration Hardware left me wary of having an expensive, blandly tasteful home that looks like something out of a catalog (it also left me with the sad realization that with the many problems facing the world today, residents of Georgetown still manage to invest a shocking amount of emotion in their drawer knobs). On the other hand, while I really love and admire Amy Sedaris, I can't see myself living in a home decorated with reconstituted pantyhose plant hangers. There must be a balance, something that says "I am an individual with a lovely home" as opposed to "Either remove your shoes before stepping in here or never return" and "Mind the chair made of discarded dryer lint! Aren't I just the kookiest?"

I really want to make this a home, something comfortable and tasteful that will inspire me to behave as if I am worthy of my surroundings. A place to have people over for gimlets and coq au vin and old movies as well as a place to moan on a futon while watching hangover television.

Or at least that was what I wanted, until I found this poster:

I think I now want a home that inspires people to say things like: "The flesh tones bring to mind the top shelf liqueurs of a border bistro." This poster is going to be the centerpiece of my new, adult den.

x equals kicking some ass

2007-02-20T15:40:00.000Z

The GRE? She is my bitch.

It's peculiar. I've done a lot to be proud of (and a not-small amount to be ashamed of) in my adult life, but the most satisfying moment of my entire weekend was sitting at that computer wearing dopey noise-blocker headphones, swaddled in my grotty Universiteit van Amsterdam sweatshirt and realizing that I STILL KNEW THE QUADRATIC FORMULA AND WAS CAPABLE OF SOLVING FOR X IN MULTIPLE STATES. I was really ridiculously proud of this, maybe a bit more so than of buying a condo. Hell, anyone can email a realtor and a lender, but can everyone out there multiply radical fractions? Shit no, soldier.

Math and I have always had a nasty relationship. Knowing from an early age that I would never work in a field that would require me to know what a factorial is or to care about the density of anything except a stupid colleague, I would cheerfully have ignored math for all of my days. Except, math, in the form of mandatory graduation requirements from the state of Michigan, sensed my disinterest and set out to destroy me via its most powerful weapon: impact on my high school GPA. Alphabetically listed, my record is a series of unblemished As - English, Drama, History-- until we get to "Math," which, bored with the distinguished company it keeps, skips straight on down to C territory. No sense wallowing in the B range when we can infect more insidiously, right?

So after math destroyed my chances of getting into a great college, it almost took away college for me, period. It was second semester, senior year, and I'd been accepted to my first-choice college for four months. I'd officially stopped caring about anything related to school, my hometown, pretty much my entire life up to that point and was now living entirely in my head. Trig class, in particular, was spent staring out the window mentally decorating my dorm room and fantasizing about striding down the marble halls of the Capitol, stiletto heels clacking as I breezed through the history-laden halls on my way to a Very Important Meeting where my opinion would Matter.

Since trigonometry is founded on the principles of triangles and not superiority complexes, it shouldn't have been a shock when I found out I was failing. But of course it was. Seeing an actual "E" (we didn't use F; some bullshit about how it's bad for self-esteem or whatever) on my midsemester report snapped me back into reality. Well, what really did it was my mother filling my head with horror stories of students whose college admission she'd personally revoked based on their senior grades. It was a brilliant strategy on her part. She never actually had to finish the story, saying "... and after I revoked his admission he went to community college, dropped out the first semester and now works at the car wash on Stadium and Hill." The merest hint that I wouldn't be able to leave my hometown come August was enough to make me pay a tutor out of pocket to teach me everything I needed to know about sines and cosines to finish the year.

As in all relationships cemented under fear and threat of physical duress, math and I have warily circled one another ever since then. I bust it out pretty much only when I have to calculate a tip, and in turn, it's been generous enough to leave me pretty well alone. I managed to graduate from college never having taken Calculus, a loophole in the graduation requirements that is probably the main reason I still give money to my alma mater. I even managed to avoid math as I prepared for the postgrad world, choosing to take the LSAT and instead spend months practicing logic problems (which, in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way, I found myself really liking by the time I took the damn test).

But then I decided law school was not for me and that I would get my master's in an arcane social science instead. Wait, you mean there's a MATH section on the GRE? I am DONE with that shit! I shoveled out that brain space long ago to make room for Herodotus and Thucydides!

The last several months have been full of probably not enough GRE studying. There was lots of sitting with Kaplan and Princeton Review GRE books in my lap, vacantly watching Instant Star or reruns of Scrubs but the actual studying, the kind that involves taking practice tests and writing out vocabulary words and algebraic formulas, didn't really begin until I went to Michigan to take care of my Dad. Like, um, a month ago. I work well under pressure, what can I say?

Apparently, I work best under the kind of pressure that leaves the scholar curled in the fetal position mumbling "IcantdothisIcantdothis," because when my score popped on the screen on Saturday it took every ounce of self-control in my exhausted body not to go "EEEEEEEEP." Because not only did I score much higher than I needed to get into my program, my math score was forty points higher than my verbal.

I'm pretty sure that this means we should all be preparing for the apocalypse, and I highly encourage you to get your affairs in order, tell your loved ones that you love them and start praying to whatever God you worship. Because the day that I do anything math-related better than anything involving big words and being a windbag is truly a sign that we are living in the End Times.

bad employee

2007-02-16T02:33:00.000Z

It all really hit me last night walking home from B's after greasy Chinese from Tony's and a half bottle of crappy champagne. I didn't have time for any of those things, for conversation or dumplings or Cook's. In the last five days I've bought a condo, crammed for the GREs, given up my apartment, written a paper proposal and liquidated resources that have been in my family for six decades. It was all going smoothly, but the speed was overwhelming and felt out of my control. As I picked my way through the frozen slush, trying not to slip on the black ice, I couldn't focus on the task of walking home without falling because there was so much crowding my brain.

I got home and looked around at my apartment, crammed full of books and bakeware and scarves and realized I was leaving this home I've been in for two years. That I had twenty-nine days to keep living my normal life and somehow pick it up and move it two miles west. And I fell apart.

Panic attacks are awful. Your heart starts to race and your vision blurs so that even as you bend your head down to gasp for breath you dart your eyes up, trying to get a lock on something right in front of you that seems to be zooming away. I knelt down in my entry way, my dirty pants hems soaking my butt as my shoulders heaved, shout-whispering "IcantdothisicantdothisicantdothisICANTDOTHIS."

I eventually got it together enough to stand up and lock the door behind me, then began pacing my apartment. It was like the photos on my fridge and the furniture and even Sadie were there in a conspiracy to make things impossible. Everything around me was spiraling away and closing in at the same time. I started pacing back and forth, erratically sitting down Indian-style and beginning to put things in piles. Start packing! I won't these tank tops before I move! Wait, I haven't worn these tank tops in six years! Why do I still own them? What kind of person doesn't give her unworn clothes to charity? Wait, don't start packing now, you idiot! I should study for the GRE! I completely screwed up the geometry section of the last test I took! FUUUUUUUCK I'm going to bomb the GRE and not be able to get into my program and then what the hell did I buy a place for because it traps me in DC and I'm wasting all this money and FUUUUUUUCK.

Repeat until 4 AM.

I always feel terribly when I call in sick to work for mental health days. I do it maybe twice a year, which is twice more than a good employee probably should. But I had to do it today. I woke up at 6:30 after a long night of freaking out, and I was a damn wreck. Puffy, red-rimmed eyes anchored by circles so dark it looked like I'd been punched. I was utterly, bone-achingly exhausted. Shockingly, a fourth consecutive night with less than four hours of sleep had not exactly left me anywhere close to satisfied. I was still shaky and nowhere closer to tackling any of the things that made me freak out the night before. They were all still there AND the GRE was now two days away.

I emailed my boss, went back to sleep and woke up feeling even worse. Now I'd managed to fail at the one thing that was entirely in my control-- being a good employee. I put myself ahead of the good of my group, and no matter how much I rationalize it, that I needed this day, that I needed to get my shit together because there would be no way to tackle both my many Friday work meetings or the test on Saturday feeling the way I was feeling, I didn't feel right about it. Once I had enough clarity to see beyond my own needs, I saw how selfish it was to take a day for myself at a critical time. Mostly, I just really, really hated letting my boss down, and hated myself for doing it.

I'm feeling better now, now that I've managed to get some sleep, relearn the Pythagorean Theorem and best of all, heard from my agent that the seller now wants to close two weeks later than we originally planned. This further convinces me that there is a benevolent God watching over this entire "buying a condo" thing, and I just fervently hope He continues His good works through moving day.

But my guilt at being a bad employee is still very much around, exacerbated by the guilt I feel at feeling guilty for taking care of myself. This, to any male readers out there, is why women worry about wrinkles so much. Because of specimens like me who elevate neurotic to its purest, most distilled form: Insanity.

pretty much the most awesome birthday present ever

2007-02-14T04:30:00.000Z

I just bought a condo.

Uhhhh...

This is the part where I freak the fuck out.

But EJ, you ask, where exactly is this coming from? Don't you have a really cute, reasonably-priced apartment in DC in a neighborhood you adore that is close to a lot of your friends.

Well. If you want to get all technical about it, yes.

But this has been brewing for a while. I have my reasons, a lot of which relate to my personal finances, which, um, we really don't need to discuss on a website where I also talk about instances in which I've been semi-naked in public or discussed my really passionate feelings issues on things like feminism and leggings. But trust me, the reasons are there and this is a great investment for me and plus, this condo is so excellent, I feel as though I have finally tasted the ambrosial nectar of true love. And oh, it is sweet.

This condo was the third I'd seen since beginning my search on Saturday. Yes, you read that right. Last Saturday. My birthday. I actually rescheduled the initial showing of the condo because I was so epically hungover from my party that I had to IM a friend begging her to order me pizza because I'd lost my cell phone at the Black Cat and the thought of leaving my apartment (much less my couch) to get food was too horrifying to think about. And yes, thank you, a bank did approve me for a mortgage. Luckily my credit score does not reflect my rate of consumption for Stella and Wild Turkey, or I'd be living in a box by the Metro.

Thank God I got the pizza, slept it off and eventually made it to see this condo last night. People, it's a dream. I walked in and fell smack head over heels in love. The hardwood floors, the poky warm kitchen, the in-unit laundry (never again will I lose pillowcases on a sidewalk), the DEN next door to the bedroom... the real estate agent almost had to scrape me off the floor when I saw the DEN.

But I was nervous. It was the third place I'd seen and it was the third day of my search. The moment you dip a toe into the murky, eel-infested waters of DC real estate, you start to hear scores of horror stories from buyers who have looked for months, had to readjust their expectations and lower their hopes, found a place and got into a vicious bidding war only to be outbid and have to eventually settle on an Anacostia rat-infested basement with "growth potential" that costs as much as a four-bedroom colonial in Leesburg. And here, right away, was a place with all of my essentials, almost all of my preferences and the asking price was significantly UNDER my spending cap. IT COULD NOT BE THIS EASY.

And of course it wasn't. My heart, which by this point had leapt so high it was hovering around my tonsils, plummented to my toes when the agent told me the place already had an offer. On my apartment? Someone else put an offer on MY apartment? It's only been on the market for eleven days! I'm the only person insane enough to want to put an offer on a place so soon! And it's MY CONDO. IT'S CALLING TO ME.

The next twenty-four hours saw a blur of frantic faxes, emails, calls and one very snowy visit to a real estate office in Maryland. My luck continued when my boss, already pretty much one of my favorite people, kindly looked the other way as I did practically nothing job-related all day today. Most bosses would berate me for being gone from the office for almost three hours on a personal matter; she gave me the recipe for the Linzer torte she baked for my birthday and loaned me her springform pan so that I could make one myself. Seriously, I am the luckiest bitch around these parts.

After biting my nails down to the painful quick and taking yet another practice GRE Quantitative section (yes, I'm also taking the GRE on Saturday. Have I mentioned I'm insane?) I went home to wait for my agent to call. She'd been very optimistic that we would be attractive to the seller and that, if necessary, we'd win in a bidding war. I was convinced that the bidding war would escalate into armed conflict and that some unknown bidder would break my heart and maybe somehow manage to destroy my credit in the process.

That didn't happen. They accepted my offer of the asking price. We close in thirty days. I'm going to be a homeowner.

Sweet bejesus shitfuck.

In all seriousness, I have huge, immense thanks to give to the incomparable Velvet. Most of you already know how much this girl rocks, but did you know that she took time out of her Saturday to walk me through the scarily intimidating process of buying DC real estate, just because I bought her a cup of coffee. She made this whole crazy idea of buying a condo seem feasible and valid and I'm so very thankful that she was willing to answer all of my questions, big and small.

Now, who has some bubble wrap I can borrow?

you say it's your fugday

2007-02-12T20:26:00.000Z

I arrived in Virginia at 10:00 on a Saturday morning, an hour much better suited for sleeping, watching reruns of Felicity on WE! Women's Entertainment, or sleeping. Did I mention the sleeping? Because I missed the sleeping. But I had a transaction to conduct, and it was not the sort of transaction that one wants people to witness. Hence the early hour and the disguise.

Hidden behind giant sunglasses, hair stuffed under a ratty newsboy cap, I parked my car in the nearly empty lot and slithered into the building. I knew exactly what I wanted and I knew who would help me get it, but I really hoped that I could avoid asking for help. I was on the kind of clandestine mission that is best conducted solo.

Poking around for a few minutes, I quickly realized I was out of my league. It was the Three Bears version of shame shopping; this one too thick, that one too small, these ones oddly shaped. I was lost, and I had to ask for the way back.

"Excuse me," I murmered until my breath at the woman beside me, "are these all the leggings Nordstrom's carries?"

GAH. I said it out loud. I IMPLICITLY STATED THAT I WAS INTERESTED IN PURCHASING A PAIR OF LEGGINGS.

Of course, the saleswoman failed to take stock of my shamed tone and started booming at me in a voice more situated to selling cattle than selling hoisery. "WEEEELLL,' she hollered "we got these short ones here, what do you call those?"

"capris?"

"Riiight, we got those cap-ris here, and then we got these BIG THICK ones that are really more like wool tights because they got feet on them and-- hey, Sheila, does BPS carry leggings upstairs, or maybe Juniors has 'em?"

Oh, yes, let's involve more people! Let's involve every floor in the store! What about the haberdasher, might he carry a pair?!

"Um, actually, I think I'm fine with these capri tights to wear under my dress tonight, so I really don't think I need leggings after all. But thanks for your help."

"Honey, hold on, we got someone on the phone from upstairs! Sheila--"

"Sheila"-- more like "Beelzebub"-- hollered from behind the desk: "They got some capri leggings upstairs but all they got is extra small and small, so I don't know if that'll work for you."

Awesome. Thanks for that, friend.

Fearful of any further humiliations at the hands of clueless salesgirls, I threw my credit card at the counter and scribbled a signature on the receipt, so excited to get out of there that I didn't even notice that I spent eighteen dollars on something that later that night, I would snag on a broken beer bottle. They weren't technically leggings, after all, and I could leave with dignity somewhat intact.

I'll admit it, I've come to love the look of capri tights with short dresses. It's flattering, sassy, and if you have the right balance of shoes, dress and tights it can be pretty adorable. I looked great at my birthday and was actually comfortable (these shoes are amazing: I've never worn shoes that are both this cute and so wonderfully not painful. Buy them immediately).

I can't explain why then I'm so vehemently opposed to leggings, and why I felt such shame at even saying the word out loud. It's a negligible difference at best, and yet it's the difference between my ratty sweatpants and a Juicy Couture tracksuit. Between a tasteful, quiet Coach bag and a Louis Vuitton logo-ed tote that screams "I SPENT LOTS OF MONEY ON THIS BAG. THIS BAG WAS EXPENSIVE." Tights say "I could totally wear these to my modern dance class" while leggings say "I spent forty bucks on something that makes my ass look the hump of a beached whale."

All I know is, the day you see me in leggings is the day I encourage you to slap me upside the face with that same broken beer bottle and send me to fashion rehab. And no, capri tights are not the same thing as leggings. Says me, that's who.

of course, she isn't even legal yet

2007-02-09T21:51:00.000Z

EJ: god, how much of a grownup am i?

EJ: i'll have to not get too drunk at my own birthday because i made an appointment with a real estate agent for the next morning

Jen: tee hee

Jen: I'm seeing a concert tonight

Jen: Margot & the Nuclear So&So's

EJ: i'm seeing alvin ailey at the kennedy center

EJ: and we're meeting for martinis first

Jen: god, you are OLD.

your daughter is a whore and it's all paris hilton's fault

2007-02-06T18:36:00.000Z

There are days when I turn on my computer, read headlines at Wonkette and the Washington Post and the New York Times and feel better about the state of humanity. Those days occur pretty rarely, though there was a significant glut of them around October and early November of 2006. Far more typical is the eye-rolling that devolves into sputtering gasping at the sheer stupidity and uselessness of what passes for much of contemporary journalism.

Given the state of the Iraq War, continuing tensions with North Korea, a massive political scandal in the administration of pretty much our only major ally, the continuing mess in what remains of New Orleans, naturally Newsweek would make this pressing issue its U.S. cover story:

"Are we raising a generation of what one L.A. mom calls 'prosti-tots,' young girls who dress like tarts, live for Dolce & Gabbana purses and can neither spell nor define such words as 'adequate?' Or does the rise of the bad girl signal something more profound, a coarsening of the culture and a devaluation of sex, love and lasting commitment?"

First of all, if you don't want your daughter to care about Dolce and Gabbana purses, you might consider not living in Los Angeles. Just a thought.

More pressingly, no, "the rise of the bad girl" does not signal something more profound. The piece goes on to say that teenage pregnancy rates are down by 35 percent since 1990 (according to the Center for Disease Control) and that adolescent drug use continues a decade-long decline. University enrollment is soaring, youth voter turnout in the 2006 election was the highest ever for a non-Presidential year and every major study shows that today's teenagers are choosing to be far more accepting when it comes to issues of race and sexual orientation than their parents ever were. Maybe some people think this is a bad idea. In my experience, these are people who pontificate one thing from their asses and then get caught doing something else with their asses entirely, something perhaps involving a male masseuse.

So there's tons of data discussing how even though Britney's cooter is hanging out for all the world to see, kids are managing to keep it together and not be led into a dangerous world of blowing rails off of hookers' asses while not doing their homework. Naturally, Newsweek mentioned this data in passing around Page 4, bookending it with anecdotal descriptions of seven-year-old girls who love Lindsay Lohan (and who will therefore do everything bad that she does) and Bad Girls of Yore, including society-destroying whores that are hugely relevant to Today's Youth like Gypsy Rose Lee, Ingrid Bergman and-- I absolutely swear I am not making this up-- the corpse of a two-thousand year old German teenager who likely committed adultery.

Yeah, that sounds like something America should be worried about. German mummy sluts.

Here's where the eye-rolling at the stupidity (mummy sluts!) segues into the seething. The headline is "Girls Gone Wild: What Are Celebs Teaching Kids?" But not ONCE in the entire piece do the authors express any concern for the virtue of America's sons. Presumably, being equipped with penises, they are also more equipped to think for themselves and are not as susceptible to the naughty lessons being taught by today's celebrities. It is our daughters who are in danger from these bad examples, our daughters who are unable to separate a song from the person who sings it and the clothes she wears, our daughters whose futures are being toyed with as they take that first step (watching the remake of Freaky Friday) towards the inevitable conclusion (passing out in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont wearing nothing but smeared eyeliner and the dual stenches of vodka and regret).

Many conservative thinkers view our sex-drenched culture as dangerous; liberals are more prone to wave off fears about the chastity of our daughters as reactionary.

Seriously? "The chastity of our daughters?" How is it possible that such antiquated, sexist language was ever allowed into a publication that fancies itself to contain "news" and "facts?" I guess I must be one of those "liberals" because I think it's disrespectful to talk about young women as if they had to be protected from the world, the better to preserve their virtue and retain their dowry.

I will grant you this: there is a crassness to a lot of pop culture that as an adult I love but that if I were a parent, I would find troubling. Oh, and also in Blindingly Obvious Truths, the sun rose this morning and it's cold out.

But where, exactly, are the guys here? Why is it that Paris Hilton is a lightning rod for everything that is wrong with America but walking genital wart Brandon Davis is never accused of leading young men astray? Why is Lindsay Lohan a slut, but no one raised an eyebrow when Matt Leinart knocked up a fellow college student in between tackling La Hilton and Alyssa Milano (oh, and dating Kristin Cavalleri when she was underage. But I'm sure all they did was talk and hold hands and drink malteds)?

It's not so much that male celebrities behaving badly never get called on it. They often do. Kevin Federline is a national joke, so much so that he's turning it into a full-time job (cheap shot alert: the first one he's ever had). But the difference is, his behavior and actions are his alone. There are no journalists wringing their hands wondering if his example will lead to a nation of boys pursuing careers as back-up dancers and babydaddies. No one is tracking the correlation between his fame and any rise in the sale of wifebeaters. This article doesn't have a single quote from a teacher, parent or media-savvy social researcher along the lines of "Diddy just had twins out of wedlock and is hanging out in clubs all night. What kind of lesson does that teach my son?"

It doesn't teach any lesson to your son, Hypothetical Person! Just like it doesn't teach any lesson to your daughter when yet another starlet forgets to wear underwear or has a sex tape "accidentally" leak out. Except for maybe, "wow, I should really never tape myself having sex. That is a bad, bad idea." Luckily, that is a lesson you could also teach them in other ways, ways not involving nightvision.

If you're doing your job as a parent, you're raising someone who doesn't take pop culture as gospel and can tell the difference between entertainment and role models. You're there to answer questions and lead by example. You teach them about consumer culture and provide a foundation that allows them to make educated choices about what they will consume. You give a daughter the same respect you'd give a son, and you'd certainly never let them read scare tactic articles like this that are just designed to fan the flames of the Mommy Wars or the Culture Wars or whatever stupid Wars we're in now.

Because for all the professed worry about young girls, this article is one of the most disrespectful, hysterical, anti-woman pieces of swill I've come across in the "mainstream" media. Really, shame on you, Newsweek. Talk about a lousy way to make a buck.

i gotta wear shades

2007-02-05T21:42:00.000Z

I'm not sure exactly what happened this weekend, but something definitely shifted. Maybe it was hanging out with all sorts of awesome people and laughing my ass off in a mutual love-fest. Perhaps it was the Fifth Annual Potomac Bedlam Showdown, complete with yours truly catching a pass and running for five whole yards before getting clobbered. Maybe it was the fun of watching the Superbowl with friends old and new and getting to be happy for people who have so much love in their lives and excited that however tangentially, I get to share in it.

But this weekend I felt really light for the first time in a long time, getting things done, kicking ass and taking names and generally being a good person on top of her shit.

I didn't realize how much of a funk I've been in lately until Sunday's lunch with a friend I haven't seen for a while. We've both been mucking through the manure of life over the last few months, dealing with sick family members and complicated encounters with not-worth-it guys. As we were filling one another in on recent events, breathlessly volleying stories like Ping-Pong balls, she paused for a moment.

"Em, I don't want to seem too-- over-reaching. And I feel bad here, because I know I shouldn't get caught up on your life from your blog. But like, recently in your writing, you've seemed pretty down."

Her candor caught me off guard for the tiniest of seconds, but I wasn't offended at all. "You're right," I mused. "I have been depressed lately." I said it with a slight air of surprise and curiosity, almost like it was a compliment. As if finally I had a name for how blue I've been.

It's funny how it takes someone else to point out something that should be obvious. Of course I've been down. Between my dad being sick and alone, winter weather doldrums, living paycheck to paycheck and the fear of being trapped since I know I'm going to be at my job for at least another year, well, yeah, shoot! It'd be easy for even a well-adjusted, organized person to feel a little lost.

I've just been so reluctant to admit that it's not normal for me to go an entire week without my sides hurting from laughter or without going out to new exhibits, concerts, meeting new people. Or that in accidentally drinking so much on a Monday that I was hungover for the next 36 hours, maybe I was not so much having fun as I was trying to self-medicate. I've been reluctant to appear self-indulgent or self-pitying, but that reluctance to do anything about how I was feeling gave me a kind of gray, sluggish approach to daily life. Like when the apartment is a disaster and you have reading to do for class and should really catch up on work email and so you don't go out with friends, but then you wind up spending the entire night eating hummus and watching 13 Going on 30 for the twenty-seventh time and go to bed at 4 AM feeling all bloated and guilty and behind on life. I've done this twice in the last month, in case you were wondering.

I'm not sure if it's good or bad that I got myself out of this funk without getting any professional help. On the one hand, it's nice to know that I have great friends who can help me through the tough stuff and that I'm capable of pulling myself up from a slump and willing happiness to come. On the other hand, maybe I could have gotten over that episode faster if I'd talked to someone about all the crap that was filling my head. Certainly I would have saved Blogger the pain of having to store some really maudlin entries that, dear Internet, you should be most grateful I didn't inflict on your tender eyes.

It's hard to get perspective on a situation when you're smack in the middle of it. After this weekend, I feel like I'm finally getting started with the year after all the false starts in January. I've got big plans in the works, work plans and a birthday to celebrate this weekend. Most importantly, I'll restart 2007 knowing that if I ever get that down again, I shouldn't be afraid to ask for help.

Onwards and upwards.