29 July 2009

Paco's Travel Bureau

I was thinking about this clip recently but never got around to finding and posting it. Now I can't even remember why I thought of it in the first place, but I was thinking about it AGAIN because tomorrow I am off to Florida where it is sure to be just as sticky as the tropics. My GOD I loved "3-2-1 Contact." "And Reading Rainbow." Holy crap what a nerd.

Rejection Lines That Don't Work

Some fellas (the desperate, the ill dressed, the unwashed) can be pretty persistent. In the midst of a good hounding, I find often find myself wondering, aside from what rejection line I might effectively use, how these men came to this unflagging pick-up persistence. There’s obviously some intermittent reinforcement going on here – meaning there are gals out there who respond in a manner indicating approval and desire for further attentions. We must find these women, and eradicate them.

1 – I have a boyfriend
- This just whets his appetite: “Your boyfriend doesn’t have to know!”
2 – I have a girlfriend
- When you say this, he hears an invitation to a three-way
3 – I’m leaving town tomorrow – forever
- Guess who wants to give you a very special bon voyage?
4 – I’m really not feeling well; I think I may vomit
- “I know what will make you feel better.”
5 – I have an STD
- “Me too!”

Ok I admit I’ve never used the last one, but I’m sort of dying to. I do wonder about the response. Maybe that’s the ONE that works?

22 July 2009

Polishing By Subtraction

So many amazing things happen on the subway: people sing, dance, perform acrobatic leaps. They eat lettuce from cookie tins, go pants-free, projectile vomit. I’ve seen mariachi bands, acapella doo-wop groups, black gothic cowboy guitar players. But nothing had prepared me for…a woman laying the perfectest coat of lilac nail polish. When I sit in the stillness of my home and attempt to polish my nails, the best I can hope for is to cover the entire tips of my fingers in polish (as if I had just dipped them in a bucket of paint) and then take away the excess with polish remover.

17 July 2009

There’s a shirtless man pacing on the roof of a building on the opposite side of Metropolitan. It's the building that Todd P's Sweat Shop is in. For all I know he could be pantsless too, but alls I can see is from the waist up. He’s slender and fit; from here I can tell he has a beard and some chest and belly hair (dark brown), though his back appears bare. He’s tan, as if he’s been making good use of the beach (or maybe just that roof) this summer. The pacing has a deliberative tone. He keeps raising his hand up to his beard and I imagine he is stroking it thoughtfully. Every so often he mixes it up with a hair tousle. He’ll come to a stop at the edge, put his hands on it and lean for a moment, then continue the pacing. A few times he came to a stop facing my direction, and I wondered if he could see me, in my kitchen, seeing him. I can’t guess how long he was up there before I noticed his presence, but now he’s gone back down to face whatever demon he’s been contemplating.

16 July 2009

Put THIS word in your pipe and smoke it

I make frequent use of dictionaries and thesauruses – paper ones, online ones, the one on my laptop. The one on my laptop is big on using words in sentences to establish the different contexts of these frequently ambiguous words I’m looking up. Here’s one such word, its definition and its sentence:

Trump (verb): figurative – beat (someone or something) by doing or saying something better: if the fetus is human life, that trumps any argument about the freedom of the mother.

What. The. Fuuuuuuuck??????? When did the Oxford American dictionary go biblical?

09 July 2009

My Destiny

I just realized, just now, 11:52 pm on July 8th, 2009, that I am going to be the mean old lady at the end of the block when I grow up (the mean old ladies and men always live at the end of the block, and I just realized why, it’s so they have nothing on one side of them, instead of another house like the one next to them filled with noisy neighbors and kids and dogs). I’ve always been kind of crotchety about noise – I moved from the LES, from the tiniest and most adorable studio apartment, because of Tuesday night party-goers, the Thursday night recyclable glass bottle goer-throughers, the every night, all night garbage trucks.

The back of my apartment, as I may have mentioned, faces out onto the Metropolitan’s outdoor seating area, and from the noise coming from there you’d think no one has a day job anymore (and they probably don’t). But usually that’s kind of ambient noise – the sounds of a large crowd, chattering. There’s the occasional shriek, sometimes a loud talker I’d like to elbow in the teeth, but I can usually focus on my fancy book-learnin’ just fine.

But just now, there were sounds coming from the street onto which the front of my apartment faces. Actually, it had been going on for a little while and I was starting to wonder what the fuck was all that racket about, so I went to have a look-see. A group of what could only have been “teenagers” was gathered in the tiny front “yard” area of a house across the street. The house where, if memory serves, I often see a 167 year old woman sitting outside, chillaxing in the sun, letting her dogs yap yap yap to their hearts content (and of course, to my hearts discontent). They were just being the loud obnoxious teenager types; like, are they even capable of talking at less than a yell? I wondered about that old lady. Did they know her? Were any of them related to her? Was she in bed right now? Does she have trouble sleeping? Does she have a craft-matic adjustable bed? They went in there so there must be some connection. All I have to say is, if those little bastards come back out, I’m getting my stick!

06 July 2009

Nothing says "summer" like Sir Mix-a-lot

I bet the first thing you think of when you think Sir Mix-a-lot is "I Like Big Butts," but how many of us remember this gem?



The memory of this quality tune was buried in the depths of the long-term, unassociated memory portion of my brain. But the other day, just after my visiting pal bought some ajax from a man selling on the street whom I figured would end up being a cop, said pal asked me, "If I got arrested, would you come visit and put 'em on the glass?" Naturally.

The whole concept of eye contact? HUGELY important.

A couple of weeks ago I went to an art opening for Googly Eye Cru. I came to know the googly eyes when I lived on the LES and often walked past a little curvy pipe that just looked so adorable with its googly eyes. I felt like I knew where I stood with that curvy pipe. Little did I know there was a serious movement behind it - but then again in New York, there always is.

Here's Christopher Walken expounding on the importance of eye contact with your plants.