one of us needs to be a unitarian

what's not to love about a religion that requires no belief, and doesn't even really require that you be religious? as far as we can tell, all it really does is reward us for recognizing our vague sense of spiritual void. all you have to do is decide that you feel a little lost, be willing to accept some mediocre classical music on assorted saturday afternoons, and offer minimal financial support to anti-war movements. existential crisis resolved. and now, back to our beer.

the dream lives on

i stand corrected.
apparently the fleece-and-rectangularglasses-wearing shaggy grad students, do get their coffee at the place that sells the pumpkin lattes (which, to my glee, are still on the menu). it remains unclear if they're going to starbucks for lack of a more hip alternative, or if they're not as sophisticated as i want them to be. either way, i may still have a chance to infiltrate their hangouts!

please limit yourself to two carry-on items

why am i always carrying around so much stuff?

for all the time spent talking about people and their existential/emotional baggage, i'd like to take a minute to rant about my actual baggage.

i don't really see what i could do differently. backpack (with workstuff including necessary books and papers, water bottle, and items that would otherwise go in a purse), lunchbox, coffee cup, gym bag- i dont' really see myself lightening the load substantially. but it gets a bit ridiculous, and really makes it hard to make a graceful entrance into my building at the end of the day. so of course, i keep running into hotbutpotentiallygayindianguy in the parking lot. actually, it's worse than that, because he always seems to be driving in behind me so i know that the humiliation in imminent. it never fails. the only times i see him i'm in my gym clothes with my nice-ish wool coat over the addidas pants, hair all matted down from running, carrying all this crap, looking like a goober.

everybody is lame except us.

come on, people, where were you last night? we tried to call you and drag you out for cheap drinks and tasty snacks. what's not to love about venturing out in the fresh snow, creepy light-up santas smiling down from porches? to be fair, almost everyone who reads this lives hours away from chicago. but still. if you really liked us...

so without you, we learned that village tap in roscoe village has a fantastic selection of microbrews on tap, including my favorite sprecher black bavarian, good tunes, and plentiful supply of eye candy. good hair, tall, smiling, jeans-and-fleece-or-sweater crowd. no backwards baseball caps. we also learned that tiny lounge is only populated with middle-aged men in white button-downs (doh) and that while riverview tavern has no view of the river, it does have a view of shaggy writer-type desperately hitting on the faux-goth-with-exposed-midriff bartender who was so clearly uninterested that it was almost painful to watch. (not too painful, obviously, since i have full details on the band he hopes to start. also, $3 sierra nevada pints are a good anesthetic.)

sadly, now i'm at work extra-early, wondering if maybe this was the reason none of you were willing to go out on a wednesday.

the tiers on the wedding cake come tumbling down

an old roommate of mine used to say that, at any given moment, you can only be sweet on one person. as someone who falls in love every week and runs a pretty busy racket of crushes and stalkings, i say that you can, in fact, be sweet on lots of people. unless, of course, most of those people turn out to creepies.

my blogmate says that she's no longer good at screening for creepies, on account of her ongoing relationship with mmmb (saving for later the rant about why she gets to stumble into a romantic weekend in milwaukee while i'm stuck at home working on my CV). so again, as someone who is always smitten, i think my screening mechanism is working relatively well, particularly as i seem to have some kind of magnetic effect on creepies... as detailed by the following story:

new guy at work. cute, very cute, though he pays more attention to his hair than i'd like. i dutifully stared him down at various meetings until one of my colleagues totally busted me looking at his butt. i can't even pretend like i wasn't planning the wedding. when he started staring back my weird spidy sense told me that i should probably do a little more investigating. so i conducted an extensive survey, by which i mean i asked 2 people, neither of whom had anything even remotely nice to say about him. the funny thing is that their descriptions were totally different from each other, but between them it really wasn't pretty. come to think of it, he said some pretty stupid things at those meetings.

from this i have drawn the following conclusions:

1) don't trust anyone who spends that much time on his hair
2) figure out if the guy is a creepie before falling in love in love with him
3) if you're going to check out someone's ass, try to be subtle about it

nothing says romance like a good face-plant

it's the classic story.

girl sees clown.
girl becomes infatuated with clown.
girl peripherally stalks clown.
clown occasionally acknowledges girl.

one find day we find our heroine feeling particularly bold. she decides to make eye contact and is rewarded with playful banter. inspired by this reciprocity, girl continues to make eye contact.

"it all comes down to this moment," she thinks, as she passes him in the hall.

and then he sticks out his foot and trips her.

could this be love?

"jackass" sounds classier when you say it with an italian accent...

...but it is downright unnerving when it comes from the mouth of my ninety-five-year-old grandfather. thankfully, it wasn't in a sentence about me, or anyone in my family. he was mid-stream in our predictable sunday-afternoon routine of pasta followed by coffee and cookies followed by monologue of times when he's been screwed over because of his thick accent. but for all the afternoons i've waited patiently through "and so i said, no, YOU need an education!" i've never really heard him use angry-sounding words. this might be partially because he interrupts his story any time there are new people around with a big smile and "how old do you think i am?" followed by the proud display of his photo in the italian community center newpaper winning the asti spumanti for being the oldest italian in town. this also might be because it is essentially difficult to angrily twirl pasta on your plate without getting sauce everywhere, and it's just poor form to waste good sauce. or this might be because being angry gets in the way of his whole back-of-the-hand-against-the-forehead life-is-very-hard schtick where he sighs that he has to take blood pressure medicine. (ninety-five and on ONE pill. life is very hard, indeed.)
and to be fair, he wasn't really angrier than usual; i just didn't know jackass was in grandpa's english vocabulary. maybe he just learned it? he did just get cable, although i assumed it was for the foreign-language news station, not mtv.

so what is the proper form to respond to a 95-year-old guy's first swearing in english in front of granddaughter?
1) "hell, yeah, gramps, bust that shit out"
2) dignified horror: cough into napkin and look around uncomfortably
3) undignified horror: "what the %&$@ did you just say?"
4) concentrate very hard on spaghetti and pretend it didn't happen
5) waste precious time blogging about it instead of working on research project with upcoming deadline

clearly i have made my choice.

hot sync this

i like to think of myself as a hip, modern sort of girl. i have a slick little lap-top with so many shiny little peripheral accoutrements that i had to go out and buy a USB hub. actually, i didn't go out at all thanks to my friend amazon.com, but i was proud of myself for having the knowledge of, and need for a USB hub. that said, i've never really been much of a techie, and i use my little gadgets with only marginal proficiency. at a lecture the other day when the prof said something about "anyone who can program a VCR can do this," i was privately embarassed- i don't know if ever got that down and now i don't even own a VCR. so when my palm pilot died a sudden, tragic death a few months ago, after a few weeks of adjustment, i got back in the habbit of making little lists in my little calendar and was starting to enjoy the satifaction of physically crossing things off and having a place to stick all my little post-its with important pieces of information on them (palm pilots don't work well for that). but now i have a new palm pilot that is, of course, much more sophisticated and is requiring me to learn a whole new grafitti alphabet and for the life of me i haven't had a chance to read the instruction manual. i don't know what made me think it was a good time to buy that MP3 player i've had my eye on. i can't even make it talk to the computer so i'm stuck listening to the weirdo music that came preprogramed. ever tried running to india arie?
add this to my growing pile of evidence that progress stinks.

stop the progress

as usual, i dont' get it.
i know that it's out of style to think of men as grunting idiots who can't talk about feelings or pick out curtains and believe me, i'm all for sensitive straight men who dress well. but some guys just cross the line. in what universe do they spill their guts to my friends and colleagues, not in a "hey, i got me a piece of that" way but in a "i'm so conflicted and confused about what's going on with us" way.
enough already. get a shower poof if you must, but please, go back to suppressing your emotions.

fuji apple fu

sushi with the girls last night brings up this title... such a fantastic name for such a fantastic dessert. any food that ends in -fu should be awarded extra style points, although apple spice cake drizzled with caramel topped with ginger ice cream doesn't really need any extra points. sorry, hot guy at miami flavors ice cream shop; i'll never forget the special time we had together with the coconut ice cream and carlos castaneda readings. but it's grown cold outside, and a new semi-ethnic dessert has stolen my heart now. don't fret- i think when it gets warmer again we still have a chance to be friends.

always a bridesmaid...

holy wedding weekend. here are the highlights (good and bad)

low: flight delayed by an hour causing me to arrive to rehearsal dinner an hour late

high: shacking up with the bride-to-be in the bridal suite (possibly the only upshot of being the only bridesmaid at the wedding stag). fancy pants room with big ol' hot tub (full o' bridesmaids)...

low: 8 AM $50 hair appointment for the dreaded up-do

high: discovering that the bride's petticoat thing (bought for the purpose of avoiding the "bridal wedgie") stands up all by itself
low: professionally taken candid shot of me putting on deoderant
high: climbing under the dress (already on the bride) to help her get her garter and shoes on

low: limo breaking down on big city streeet on way to wedding
high: limo guy actually getting out and opening the hood
even higher: bride hiking up her dress and running down the street to get into backup limo

cut to reception and after party...

low: flirting shamelessly with groomsman who was not, as i orginally thought, there alone.
lower: drunken groomsmen dropping like flies. lots of vomiting.
even lower: cops called from hotel bar on belligerent drunk friend of bridesmaid
high: calling my parents who come together to pick me up from drunken after-party

low: flight home delayed by 2 1/2 hours
high: killing time with my parents in sketchy 24 hour diner next to the airport drinking $1 budlight in can with a side of crinkle cut fries
low: flight home next to abrasive, slightly maladjusted psychiatrist who really wants to talk to me (i think i'm becoming a magnet for people with sociopathic tendencies)

the downward spiral (apologies to trent reznor)

sad (but acceptable): drinking alone.
sadder: trying to drink alone, and failing.

how excited i was to open my fridge looking for the last of the spiced wine leftover from this week's hanukkristmasfest, only to find out that spiced wine does not save well. i will keep that strategy in mind next time i'm looking for wine-flavored pancake syrup. holy molasses.

but never fear; a girl determined to drink alone will find her way. next, how excited i was to finish the last glass of the mark west pinot noir brought for hanukkristmas by a good friend. aah, a toast to friendship; it's not so bad to drink alone if the initial gift was from a friend, right? oops- apparently i already drank alone a few days ago, and polished off all but one sip of the mark west.

oh well; resolving to buy another bottle of that pinot noir for the next dinner party, i headed back to the fridge for a beer. not as classy, but beggars can't be choosers... except that the only beer left in the fridge was paulaner salvator double bock, a bad idea from awhile back, only here for boiling brats.

so now it's just me and my good friend jameson, wondering where the party has gone.

people don't kill people- postal workers do

new use of blog: diffusing violent rage between boring conferences.

i will not lose my cool at work. i will not use my cool at work. i will not behead the next person who crosses my path.

but really. if you were to look at the relative amount of time i've spent at any one task today, the clear winner would be parking and unparking my car. i actually got angry enough to leave a nasty note for the jerk who has decided that his (or her) new car deserves two parking spaces. on my way out of frazzled stop #3 today i got personally yelled at by a parking lot guy. i think i'd rather get a ticket than get verbally assaulted by the 80 year old security guard.

and the worst is yet to come: mandatory "volunteer" community service, all alone with curmudgeon boss- you know the "when i was your age i had to walk to school up hill in both directions barefoot in the snow" guy- he's that guy. i was supposed to share the misery with a co-worker but she "forgot" about it and booked a ticket to vegas.

now i have to make photocopies. i will not lose my cool at work...

queer eye unfiltered

raise your hand if you're a straight male who uses a shower poof.

on a non-blind but nonetheless non-good date a few months ago i had a guy confess to using a shower poof with such gravity you'd think he'd just told me that he likes to watch beaches while eating cookie dough.

man-using-shower-poof doesn't even qualify as metrosexual.

well, now i'm just being snotty.

all right, i know this is being picky, but one of the higher-ups at work spent a good part of a lunch meeting using the word denouement over and over again when he could have easily just used conclusion. i know it's his m.o. to sound all intellectual, but i really think if had to use it as a slide title in his powerpoint presentation he could have spelled it right. is that a horrible standard? i don't really care if people have typos on blogs, or even fancy powerpoint presentations. but if you're going to strut, it helps not to have a limp, you know?

sultry chromium devil

i'm the first to admit that i don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of mainstream american culture, but even if i did, the following phenomena would continue to baffle me:

1) buffalo wings. i don't understand. they're tiny, slimy chicken parts slathered in more slime except now it's sweet slime fueled by red dye #8 and some kind of chemically extracted BBQ flavor. they come in basket with slimy, stinky french cheese and, just for fun, celery. i can't for the life of me understand the zeal with which people (some of whom i respect very much- like my blogmate and my brother) eat such nastiness.

2) american girl place. for those of you fortunate enough to have missed this insanity, let me describe it briefly. massive 3-story establishment of department store proportions dedicated exclusively to the selling of very creepy and VERY expensive dolls that can bought to look just like the children of the purchasers (along with a dizzying array of accoutrements). the whole thing is some kind of shrine to itself. they have their own restaurant where the dolls can be seated at the table next to their weird twin owners. the dolls can then be taken to the doll salon where grownups pay other grownups to coiffe the dolls with trendy up-dos. it seems like every tourist family strolling down michigan avenue is armed with multiple american girl place bags in hand (tourists flocking to the michigan avenue gap like it's somehow different from the sheboygan gap is another topic all together). people actually stand in long lines just for the priviledge of entering the store.

3) people waiting in line at the gym to use the newest, fanciest treadmills when there are numerous, slightly less shiny but nonetheless fully functional treadmills available. add all the display features and calorie counting that you want. running in place on a revolving mat is the same activity no matter how many gizmos adorn the apparatus. i'm sure that the same number of calories are burned, and i'm also sure that a) you're just as likely to trip and fall, and 2) running in place indoors in the meat market gym is just as sucky.

and finally... 4) giving shoes proper names. it's very entertaining to look at the names that shoe companies give the various styles. i think that "black mid-calf boot #71632" would suffice. instead you wind up with NWbrayden, or, my favorite: sultry chromium devil.

epi-blogue

some brief follow-up on prior blog topics:

1. chatty wet goth sitting on the stairwell patiently waiting for amyandmichelle apparently angered the fungal scholar who lives downstairs. i arrived to my apartment this evening to find an anonymous note signed "apt #1" whose handwriting suspiciously matches the other notes on the main door reading "please leave all mushroom related subscriptions for ls" asking me to stop letting strangers into the building. that's fair, i guess, but if i were to line up the chatty wet goth and the guy who reads all the mushroom stuff, and they both were to look you in the eye and tell you they just forgot the key or arrived too early for their guests, you wouldn't be able to tell which was the creepie and which was the actual neighbor. and chatty goth is a better conversationalist than my mushroom neighbor. besides, i was home the whole night so if there was a ruckus caused, i would have heard it, and naturally would have been hanging out my window slack-jawed spying on the whole scene.

2. my blogmate's commentary on least favorite songs has resulted in my boyfriend thinking he's quite clever (qcmb?) by downloading as much dido as possible and playing it for me every time we're about to leave the apartment, leaving me with stupid white flag in my head all night long.

i leave it to you to decide which is worse: letting unwanted goth in from the rain, or letting unwanted dido into my head? i will go dooooown with thiiiiis ship....

un-pent rage

we all know that chicago is a city of unexplainable random traffic jams, but the one i encountered today wins the award for it's near induction of psychotic break. on my way from target to the grocery store (step 1, buy everyone's holiday gifts in one place, step 2, buy assload of potatoes for latke making) i found myself stuck in standstill traffic on a not particularly busy road at a not particularly important intersection at 11AM on a sunday. not just a little backed up i tell you, NO MOVEMENT for about 20 minutes. i made myself feel better about it by imagining the gruesome carnage that must be surrounding the worst accident ever. damn it, i thought, if i'm going to sit here, growing older, feeling my life pass me by with avril lavigne for soundtrack (how can a city with so many people have so few radio stations?), somebody had better be dead. but alas, it wasn't a 4-car pileup with 2 ruptured spleens and a decapitation. it was the world's longest parade of non-badass looking harley riders. i kid you not, thousands of very docile looking motorcylce riders parading down western avenue, blocking traffic for miles in every direction, ruining my life.

i guess i'll save my tyrade about not understanding buffalo wings for another day.

play on mr. wendell

as i embark on my quarter-life crisis, i've been trying to broaden my musical horizons a bit and have made the unfortunate mistake of starting to pay attention to the words. i should have stuck to blindly singing along without giving any thought to what i was actually saying because now i'm really annoyed.

i think it's time to talk about the many ways in which song lyrics can suck.

#1. singing about prostitution or homelessnes- especially when the misguided rocker is so presumptuous as sing from down-and-out's point of view- or when using the predicament of prostitution or homelessness as a metaphor for how hard life is. countless examples... modern- the corrs, older phil collins.

#2. no one understands what it's like to be famous- i'm sure i don't know what it's like to brittany spears, but i'd like to keep it that way thankyouverymuch. and besides, no sympathy.

#3. wrist slitting sadness- these are tricky, as the songs actually tend to be kind of good as long as they're not too goth. but listen to dido long enough and you want to jump off a bridge a little bit.

#4. cryptic and weird- the most frequent offense among singers i actually like. it's good music, but what the hell is dave matthews talking about? sarah mclaughlin, natalie merchant... barenaked ladies, bjork- they all do it. it's easier if you just give up and stop trying. you'll never know what postcards from chimpanzees sympbolize.

#5. blingbling- i'll actually take a good amount of girl shake that thang before i start to burn out. and there's really something pretty funny about a lady on the street and freak in da bed. at least it's not pretentious. JZ can sing about his love soliders all he wants. same with boy bands. everybody rock your body, man.

#6. creepy fairy world- a category reserved exclusively for tori amos.

#7. and finally, the lowest of the low, SELF INDULGENT AND ANGSTY. my personal contemporary favorites are "you don't know what it's like to be me," and "did you really think that i was gonna give it up to you?" i'm mean really, "did you think that that was something i was gonna doooooo?" all these 20-something garage bands that sing about not knowing who they are and not getting along with their parents and just wanting to be themselves. i can't take anymore.

frank lloyd wrong

i'm so sorry, that's the worst title ever. but there it stays, taunting you with its badness.

one of our faithful readers informs me that our blog is difficult to comment on because the stories are so random. and since we only have a few faithful readers, that means a significant percentage of our readership refuses to become commentor-ship, which is a problem. so today i implore you to please help me by commenting on this story:

if you've been reading along, you'll know that my good blogmate recently went on a date with a local architecture buff. sounded good. only it turned out that he wasn't really an architecture buff, but didn't actually like architecture, or anything else, and he was so undecided about the date that he called back to make sure she understood it wasn't a real date, and couldn't carry a two-sentence conversation for the whole thing. so it was a non-good non-date with a non-architecture buff. my biggest disappointment is that, once again, i didn't get to spy on them. but the bigger problem is that my blogmate is taking the suckiness of the non-date personally. my argument to the contrary?

1) you cannot make someone un-boring
2) you cannot make someone un-depressed or un-dysthymic
3) you cannot give someone tact
4) you cannot remove someone's receding hairline or bad teeth
5) you can run, but you cannot hide someone's fatness

but most importantly: she only went in the first place to see a) if she remembered who this guy was, and b) since he was clearly dysfunctional and broken from his previous relationship, at least he might be funny enough for not a romantic rendezvous, but a life-coaching situation where she got to give him advice on girls while they watched the wb and ate pizza. therefore:

6) if your highest aspiration for the guy is that you might be able to recognize him on the street and laugh at his anti-social tendencies, i say you cannot take it personally if the guy doesn't sweep you off your feet.

people, help me here.

architecture binge

ok, ok, i know that i promised myself that i'd stop slandering lame-o on the blog, but i really need to talk about this... more than i already have.

actually, it's really not about slander (or libel- i can't ever remember which is which). it's about me. i continue to believe that confessing bad thoughts or deeds gets you half way to absolution.

the result of the unfiltered blurting out of "hey, you don't get to ask me out and then take it back!" was the making of actual plans to meet lame-o face to face. mind you, they're casualcupofcoffeebutdefinitelynotadate plans, but progress has been made- we've even talked on the phone now. but get this: i have NO CLUE who this guy is. it seems that the person with whom i remember shamelessly flirting all those years ago was someone TOTALLY DIFFERENT. and you know that it wasn't on discovery of this most interesting plot twist that i decided to suppress my filterlessness. no, no. maniacal laughter of "ha! i have no idea who you are!"

what worries me about this whole fiasco is that it sounds like i was throwing myself at not one but two people, and my ability to recall the whole thing has been clouded by 1) the effects of excessive alcohol intake, and 2) the fact the memory filter that allows me suppress unsavory events is working just fine. is it possible that i've really managed to merge these two guys into one collective groomsman?

in any case, the upcoming non-date was as good an excuse as any to find myself having a meltdown about mascara in the makeup isle at target with my blogmate (who was totally useless to me in the picking one of the zillion kinds of mascara that there are). how am i supposed to know if i want lengthening, waterproof, fattening, volumizing, curved brush, straight brush, black, jet black, near black, panoramic (panoramic?)? talk about too many adjectives- i just want not to have clumpy eyelashes (or to wear anything on my face that has to be removed with abrasive chemicals)! fortunately, while our non-drinking friend doesn't know anything about booze, she knows plenty about makeup and hair clips and stuff- so we were able to put in a frantic cell phone call and have her bail us out of our mascara debacle.

with non-clumpy eyelashes and my best lookhotwithouttryingdon'tyouwishthiswereadate outfit, i'm ready for my close-up mr. deville.