the good, the bad and the stinky

we're back from sunny warm new orleans. what a great weekend! my blogmate was, as always, a thoughtful host, filling our time with fun activities, good food and drink, great people. i learned that there are many ways to unhouse little crawfish from their shells at lunchtime, that abita beer distributes to several states but does not bottle their strawberry lager (tragic), that $3 fake dolce and gabbana sunglasses are every bit as glamorous as i'd imagined, and that i am a much better dancer when budweiser is $1.25 a can. hee.

i also learned that new orleans has its share of crazy hippies, whose habits are almost as much fun to catalog as the movements of my creepy neighbor:

- taking the 3rd place award for best hippiewatching was the mild-mannered costa-rica-t-shirt-wearing 40-year-old mullet-hippie who wandered halfway across the audience where papa grows funk was playing at french quarter fest, told us we looked nice, and wandered back. given that we were dirty, drunk, and sitting on a lawn littered with empty plastic beer glasses, i am sure we were faces only a hippie could love.

- in 2nd place for hippiewatch was my blogmate's ex, who we met during my five minutes on bourbon street. when my blogmate was accosted by a hairy bearded manic guy wearing cut-off khakis and a latin-american-fabric-vest, talking a mile a minute about some band who was "the best f*&('in band EVER!", i figured this had to be some crazy she'd dated back in the day... nice guy, who took our ribbing about his man-purse fairly well.

- in a clear first place for hippiewatch came good citizen hippie, a dreadlocked lanky man who passed us on the street in the french quarter. coming the other way was a man pushing his friend in a wheelchair, who was not seen by the minivan driver trying to back out of a narrow driveway. we saw the impending minivan-wheelchair disaster coming, but couldn't react in time to fix it - you know that slow-motion "nooooo-OOOOOOOOOOO...." that happens? that was us. but not good citizen hippie! he sprinted back to the minivan, threw himself between the minivan and wheelchair, shouting until the minivan stopped. at that point, good citizen hippie decided to direct traffic for a little while, allowing the wheelchaired man to pass, as well as a mother with her small daughter in a stroller. i kept looking for old ladies with walkers for the hippie to help across the street.

- related to hippiewatching: honorable mention goes to the guy who sat by us on the plane from new orleans to nashville, who is not really a hippie but works for some advertising group that promotes jazzfest and other hippie music festivals like the one in tennessee where all the hippies come live on the farm together for four days and smoke to dave matthews. note to any man reading this with a music-related occupation: if you name-drop too much while describing your job, women will not believe you, and will think you are full of yourself. it's similar to guys who claim to be djs. they are never really djs, they just have lots of stereo equipment in their car trunks. (i will consider an exception to this for henry at wort in madison, because i don't think the djs there are actually paid anything so it's a little hard to be full of anything, plus it's one of my favorite radio stations besides the diva in new orleans - music for the diva in me? that's great! bring on the rupaul, paula abdul and ryan cabrera techno mixes! who the heck is ryan cabrera, and where did he come from? but now i'm really digressing. back to the hippies.) so the plane hippie organizer. yeah, points to the guy who takes himself seriously describing midwesterners as "good people" when he has never actually been here, and who looks at me funny when i snicker every time he says widespread panic.

hmm... i guess i still haven't said anything about what we did in new orleans. next time: our collective inner turmoil about our stated hatred of chicago's love affair with floofy martinis, standing in unfortunate contrast to our demonstrated fondness for the many many 25-cent key lime martinis we drank at lunch monday. doh.

road trip muse

i'm so excited! this afternoon i am headed for the good state of louisiana with my blogmate (mb; wait, no, we established that was wrong...). i can't wait to see her hometown of new orleans. apparently we are also heading to the beautiful city of ponchatoula (is that right?). i think the itinerary consists of eating, drinking, live music, eating, drinking, ponchatoula, and maybe if i'm lucky getting to meet some of the people who i've never met that visit our humble blog.

this brings up the issue of reciprocation. i feel like i should offer some similar road trip to visit my hometown. but i just got back from a few days in northern wisconsin, which confirmed my belief that this would be an uneven trade. ah, the northwoods... the farther north you go, the more ridiculous it gets. really, after the jellybelly factory just across the il-wi border and house of cheese in kenosha (where weezer once played) it all goes downhill. adult video store billboards (three of them are all named "superb adult video") flank right-to-life signs announcing that 40 million babies will never pay social security and that fetuses smile at 12 weeks. (apparently truth in advertising doesn't apply in wisconsin. i suppose "tacky adult video" isn't as catchy, and the social security argument is a little weirdly utilitarian or something, but i am reasonably sure that a fetus doesn't smile. i don't know much about embryology, but i looked it up online and at 12 weeks the muscles have just learned how to respond to the brain, so the little fetus can sort of twitch. anyway.) cultural attractions include an art gallery advertising chicken for sale; "proud american" and "support our troops" car decals are offset by mudflaps on teal mercury tracers reading "nasty," and there's a sign welcoming travellers by announcing that this is "as far north as you need to go." too bad that sign was 25 miles south of home.

one of my friend's younger sisters just graduated from college in d.c. and refers to her time back at home as "soul sucking." so what do i have to show off? there's always the road trip to appleton so my good blogmate can see the harry houdini museum she finds so fascinating, the $1 beers at korth's bar, the string of phallic-esque names on main street (pensis chiropractic, bump's bar, photography by the wackers). we could stop at the gas station at mills fleet farm (think farm implement store meets walmart) and get the free popcorn that comes with tanks of gas, trying hard not to be weirded out by the long-haired flannel-wearing-in-summer leering men who seem to just sit in the corner. of course we would commemorate her stay with one of the many charming fleet farm t-shirts like "i am woman / i shop fleet farm" or "if they don't sell it at mills fleet farm, i don't want it."

i know there are wisconsin people who read this blog. help a girl out; what's exciting about our little town? i feel like we have to step up the commentary, on account of the southern contingent is kicking our collective butt. i was also thinking, given the current pattern of people starting to finally comment on the blog once we've started writing about them, that it's time to start a jerry-lewis-telethon-like introduction to our readership. you've met mb, rcfog, tb, dwtacc, twinset, mr. honesty. (does anyone else think mr. honesty sounds a little like a porn name?) butterknife, you're coming up. you know who you are.

who's filterless now?

i almost forgot.

at one of the many basketball-watching marathons last weekend, i found myself seated next to a work acquaintance who had perhaps had a few too many. i don't know this guy particularly well and he's a couple of rungs higher than me on the professional ladder, so i was very entertained by his sudden, overwhelming need to, well, share. with the exception of dwtacc, i think most of us are quite familiar with the acquired filterlessness that accompanies inebriation, and the young man in question decided that the time had come to lay his cards on the table.
he readily admitted that while perhaps not so much of a catch in his youth, over time (and evolving degree of job-having-ness) he became something of a ladies man (that is, until, he settled down with his current girl whom he confesses is way cooler than him). for whatever reason, mr. honesty decided that enumerating his various, um, social exploits as a young professional was of vital importance... but he kept miscounting and having to start over. then i remembered how much fun it can be to be the (relatively) sober one.

and though i am (and will likely remain), stymied by the sudden flood of interest in our humble blog (complete with active participation by our loyal readership), i have to admit that the above tribute's function is as a recruitment tool. it seems that the best way to get people to invest in filterlessness is to unabashedly talk about them.

where's the foul?

my blogmate always teases me about my episodic bouts of sports fanatacism. she has a point: for the better part of the year i'm only vaguely interested, but come play-off time suddenly i become some sort of glued-to-the-TV maniac.

the difference between me and the true fan became clear to me as i talked my good friend dwtacc (down with the ACC... she rejected "friend#1" on account of it wasn't personal enough) off a ledge monday after the illini failed to capture the NCAA title. i'll admit, it was a painful game to watch, what with the offense seemingly being played from half-court and passes bouncing off the backs of unsuspecting teammates who were looking the wrong way (in the final minutes of a 3 point game). now, i don't claim to know much about basketball, but you know something's wrong when you ask yourself, "hey, why is he running in the wrong direction?"

in any case, i really was a little worried about dwtacc as she went right through the yelling and swearing phase (surprising coming from the girl who ordinarily isn't much of a potty-mouth... unless she finds herself at a 22,000 person race hoping to serendipitously run into her friends who are holding her race number while said friends are still standing on the el platform like idiots), and directly entered the stern, silent phase. i didn't think she disliked anyone more than her creepy ex-boyfriend who keeps calling her (over and over and over) but it turns out that her new sworn enemy is sean may (oafishly big tarheel who was the clear sweetheart of the game and is the child of an important hoosier, for those of you who don't know... like me before last night).

so i think we should all bow our heads in a moment of silence, mourning the illini's loss of the NCAA title... at least in solidarity with my devastated friend.

introducing the coen brothers' many poor, less talented cousins

i love bad movies and i love spying on my neighbors. so imagine my excitement at finding myself getting both items at once this weekend.

somehow, a lazy saturday filled with browsing bookstores and gorging on so-cheap breakfast at our local dive turned into a conversation between mb and me about spring cleaning. and before i knew it, that conversation about spring cleaning had turned into spring cleaning itself, with lots of throwing away the worst of my hand-me-down furniture to make some room for mb's stuff still in storage. away with the paint-peeling orange-and-green desk (not a small feat, as we live on the top floor of a walk-up). but as we were preparing to take the next load down the back stairs to the trash bin, we noticed some activity next door. gathered around a black saturn in the driveway were two college boys dressed as beat cops, complete with the big hats and beating sticks (what do you call those?), two more dressed like luigi from super mario brothers, a villain and a sort of non-descript overweight guy whose role i could never ascertain. peering out from a bedroom window above the black saturn was another college guy dressed in yellow striped pajamas and a red sleeping cap (the long pointy elf-ey kind). after about thirty minutes of standing in a big circle laughing at themselves, they all lined up and one by one climbed up the saturn and piled through the bedroom window. then they came out, stood around again, sang some songs, and did it again, this time interrupted with a lot of "wait... should my head be here or over here? no, it'll look stupid if my head is over too far..." eventually they moved the car, brought out a ladder (hmm... that would have been helpful first) and a video camera, laughed some more, and dispersed.

i can only assume one of them is taking some kind of film class, because i can't imagine u of c students do this kind of thing for fun. (i would, but that's beside the point.) but they were so pleased with themselves that they didn't notice our side-splitting laughter next door. i almost dropped the old recliner i was holding. (note to the fans of my recliner: yes, it's time for it to go. yes, tears were shed. no, it's not gone yet - it's sitting on the porch where mb is using it as his grillin' chair until it rains. and to my blogmate: no, the orange shag which once covered the chair is not gone. we now have orange shag carpet, to which mb is fastidiously applying rug backing, giddy with excitement that after all these years, his precious orange shag rug is finally on the floor where it was meant to be.) i was a little relieved that i couldn't keep getting rid of furniture for fear of ruining the guys' carefully constructed shots... although a plummeting recliner might not have been completely out of place.

the world sprang ahead... and i fell back

it was quite a weekend. i took my friend's hair on a date, lost my cool at the patagonia store, and missed a road race... oh yeah, and watched lots of basketball.

just i was getting myself comfortably curled up on the couch on friday night, finally ready to watch the last episodes of sex and the city, ending the crack-TV siege, little miss twin set called to announce that after 2 hours and $200 she wasn't wasting her cute, bouncy haircut at home with her husband- apparently he too was comfortably curled up on the couch. so i did what any self-respecting friend-of-married-girl would do- hopped in the shower, drank a beer, and pulled on my sassygoingout boots. she showed up (2 hours and $200 later) a little punchy having split a bottle of wine with her hair dresser, ready to be shown a good time. i think i was a pretty good date- we drank an excessive number of mojitos and waited an excessively long time for a table at an excessively trendy restaurant. afterwards, being the perfect gentleman that i am, i put my tipsy friend and her hair in a cab and sent them home to her hubby.

i spent the next day out and about with my friend (gwcbwdbsbhhwtt for those of you paying attention) and her brother. he had a gift certificate to spend at the patagonia store, so after wandering around the art supply store wishing i was artistic, i wandered around patagonia wishing i was out-doorsy. perhaps if i actually was out-doorsy i wouldn't have been so snide in supplying mr. everest base camp with the word for which he searching ("technology") but as he rambled on about the high-tech, windproof, fire-proof, NASA-quality fleece i found it harder and harder to keep it together. when he started to pitch the sonically-guided seams i lost all composure and started laughing uncontrollably. i had to sit down in the adirondak chair (supplied so that weary shoppers could watch a movie about banff) just to catch my breath. though none of the patagonia employees seemed particularly appreciative of my amusement, they were fortuitously distracted, moments later, by a dramatic fender-bender in the parking lot. i think somebody rear-ended mr. base camp's jeep.

the next morning i found myself pacing around on the corner of belmont and clark at what i thought was 8AM, waiting for friend#1. when she hadn't appeared 15 minutes later i ran to the el to meet friend#2 in an attempt to keep the whole plan from disintegrating. but i was too late. i raced up the stairs to find friend#2 taking on his cell phone to friend#1 who was the only one of us to have remembered the time change. "hi," he said, "what time do you think it is?" while friend#1 actually made it downtown in time to run in chicago's big spring 8K, we were holding all the race packets. after all that fretting about my lack of preparedness and gimp-footedness we missed it completely! determined to maintain our fragile dignity, we ran our own private 8K race on the lake and went to the post-race party as if nothing had happened. i blame the final four- surely if we hadn't all three been glued to our bar-stools yesterday watching michigan state get clobbered, one of us might have anticipated this.

go illini!

acknowledgements and musings

clearly i'm a bad person: yesterday i lied to an ACLU guy on the phone. this morning i didn't listen to NPR because i can't take the guilt of pledge season.

the fundraising did get me to thinking, though. as we enter our 7th month of blogging, i think it's time to thank our loyal readership- we couldn't do it without you (actually, we probably could, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun). not including myself or my blogmate, i think our readers now number in the double digits (provided we haven't scared off rcfog).

in other news, now that i've put my infatuations with the various wedding boys behind me, i'm back to obsessing about the double indian neurologists (in1, in2). in1 continues to render me mute (or a babbling moron) with his dashing good looks and irresistible charisma, though i remain unnerved by his overwhelmingly good fashion sense. in2 has turned out to be a little louder and more obnoxious than i would have expected, but in a good way. there have been some very subtle flurries of activity (if i were smarter i could use some kind of geeky EEG analogy) and i'm hoping that he'll make an appearance at our mutual friend's basketball-watching party (read: psychotic, screaming, go-illini hysteria) this weekend... because clearly what i need is to fuel this ridiculous obsession.

seven degrees of kevin bacon

mb and i realized this morning that ever since we've moved to chicago, we seem to be much closer to celebrities. well, maybe not actual celebrities, but we now know people who know people, which is the best we figure we'll ever do. true, mb knows his share of olympic athletes and ironman winners from being a college swimmer and triathlete. i am a little athletic too, but the olympic marathoners don't run from the 4:30 markers, so no rubbing shoulders with the greats for me (although i did get passed by a rather portly tommy thompson once in a 5k run).

so one of our bosses has a wife who comes from some amount of money, and he tells stories about hanging out with hilary clinton. during my job promotion interview yesterday, i learned all about my bosses' various famousnesses, including being on cnn and featured in time magazine. but best of all, it turns out that one of my blogmate's friends was a debutante! i had only heard of this before in movies, but you know that whole thing where eligible women get to dress up all pretty and get displayed to the society men at their parents' social gatherings? not only do i know someone who knows someone, but i get to ride in that someone's someone's car during my upcoming trip to new orleans. my butt will be sitting on a seat that gets sat on by greatness. job interview or not: i'm really going places now.

guilt by association

over $10 burgers at the "neighborhood bar" the other night, my blogmate called to my attention the list of $10 martinis on the wall. i'll spare you another rant about my lack of understanding of chicagoans and their ritzy martinis, but the final three on this list were pretty funny, especially when read sequentially:

french

dirty

wet

i mean really. are we talking about drinks or porn?

meanwhile, back at the ranch...

i'm a little embarrassed.

i lead such a comparatively uninteresting life. my weekend consisted of working, eating and running. and truth be told, that's how i spend most of my time. when my blogmate (who i can't acronymize properly because it makes her "mb," which would really throw me off) got home from her rowdy wedding festivities and said "so how was your weekend?" i only had "it was fine! i learned how to make cornish game hens and pilot my new meat thermometer!" and whereas my good blogmate (ooooohh... mgb?) returned from our sex-and-the-city-like dinner to clever although rather unnecessarily deflating comments about her scandalous behavior, i returned home to my boyfriend (mb; you can see where this gets confusing) serenely sitting on the couch with a book, looking up only to ask "can you give me an example of a paradox?" far from scandalous.

to be fair, the paradox conversation was a little funny. you try to come up with good examples after helping down a bottle of pinot noir. but mostly, i'm very excited that if i can't be the girl who spends her time kissing her gay friends and punk rock acquaintances and staying out until three, at least i get to be friends with that girl, and feel a little cooler by association.

do you want fries with that?

you all know our good connecticut friend who constantly amuses us with her good breeding (and willingness to talk about thongs and cuss like a sailor in public). i mean really- who else leaves messages like, "i was wondering if i could impose on you to borrow your greenday CD" on answering machines? after a sexandthecity-like dinner our little circle of sexandthecity-like girlfriends (to the extent that there are four of us) gave her a good razzing about her choice of restaurant. we'd decided that none of us could stand to shower, much less cook, and after weeks of her raving about her new favorite burger joint we finally gave in. she'd promised us some sort of neighborhood dive where we'd fit right in in our cargo pants and running shoes... not a self-proclaimed bistro that served free-range chicken and escargot (to which she wore a twin set with pearl buttons). as usual, my blogmate and i quickly buckled under the pressure of our impending yuppiness, ordered a bottle of pinot noir, and proceeded to have a perfectly lovely evening with our friends (deliberately mispronouncing things on the menu and mocking the personal habits of our coworkers).

i strolled into my apartment in high-spirits, not at all expecting to find a very funny and gentle rejection on my very own blog. until then i had no idea you could have an awkward silence all by yourself. don't get me wrong- i'm actually quite excited to have enticed a near-stranger to participate in our blogging adventure so actively- in fact i hope rcfog will keep it up...

nonetheless, i think it's about time i gave myself my own acronym. i've never felt like i needed one, as "me" seemed to suffice. but now i think vefob (very embarrassed friend of bride) is perhaps more fitting.

bourbon is a double-edged sword

now that i've returned to my baseline, non-bridesmaid state (i.e. eagerly awaiting the next episode of gilmore girls and watching basketball over PBR) i've got time to extensively ponder my bridesmaid behavior and have come to some unsettling conclusions.

i started to ask myself why the rather cute friend of the groom (rcfog) with whom i spent the better part of an evening engaged in flirty banter wasn't willing to aknowledge said flirty banter. but now that i'm back to my usual state of relative clarity, it's all too clear- or rather, the possibilities are endless:

could it be that i spent the better part of the previous evening engaged in flirty banter with the punk rock groomsman (prgm) IN FRONT of rcfog (and yes, i know he noticed on account of he called me out on it later)? or maybe it was the fact that there were scheduled make-out sessions with not one, but two gay friends of the groom (gfog#1 and gfog#2)- for the record they both said i was a good kisser but who knows what that means? it could also have something to do with my kicking off the conversation with rcfog with a pretty self-incriminating story about the groom busting me doing something that would (to an outsider) make me appear considerably more sketchy than i actually am (i had to tell rcfog something- he wanted dirt on the bachelorette party and i didn't want to cough it up).

whatever the reason that rcfog didn't immediately (or in the face of my amazing persistence) succomb to my adorable charm, i'm sure that i might be in more favorable standing had i not hit the bottle quite so hard. it's hard to know when alcohol switches from social lubricant to enough rope to hang yourself.

blogger hits the road

i never thought i'd hear myself say this, but i don't think i can take another open bar.

staring blankly at the chipper bar tender this morning at the um-teenth garden party in the last two weeks, i declined the bloody mary and oyster shooter, opting instead for orange juice and coffee.

i pondered the events of the last 72 hours, unable to draw any meaningful conclusions.

now that i've recovered from the slack-jawed paralyzed state i entered after, "hey, this is sort of funny since my ex-girlfriend is marrying your ex-boyfriend," and have laid to rest my transient crush on the punk rock groomsman, i have to ask myself: how is that we're still such drunken idiots?

don't get me wrong. i'm all in favor of drunkenness, and, quite frankly, am idiotic enough when i'm sober... but i don't think my body can take the two in combination anymore- i just can't keep up.

i guess i'll have to take comfort in not being the biggest drunken idiot. as i greeted the aforementioned punk rock groomsman who couldn't understand why i didn't want to drink vodka at 11AM on easter sunday i wondered why in the world he was so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. then i noticed that he was very much wearing his tux from last night having clearly spent the night in a hotel room other than his own.

i'm one to talk, i guess, since i woke up with a walloping headache and someone's phone number written on my hand. fortunately for me, the decorum of staying with your parents requires that you come home alone to your own bed.

i feel like there's a lesson in here somewhere, but i think i'm just too hungover to see it. talk about running on empty.

maybe i'm a quack, but in my defense...

first of all, a few words on the previously mentioned yuppie afternoon: as much as i love my jeans-and-sweatshirt lifestyle, i thought it was time for a self-esteem afternoon. you know - feeling out of shape? run a little. feeling poor? return an expensive purchase you don't need. feeling unhealthy? have healthy dinner. granted, by "return expensive purchase" i wasn't expecting the subsequent "make replacement expensive purchase," and by "healthy" i didn't have to mean sushi, which helped the feeling unhealthy but exacerbated the feeling poor. but it was fun.

except now my blogmate is off on yet another bridemaid-related trip back home, while i am stuck at work this weekend hoping she has fun and has a drink or two for me. sad, though, because apparently her foot hurts too much to walk on it. parting words to me were that she feels vindicated for my not believing her yesterday when we were running. so, in my defense, she was complaining of knee pain, hip pain and ankle pain. no foot pain. i am not a rocket scientist, and i realize it sounds lame to say i didn't believe her knee, hip and ankle pain but that her foot is an entirely different story. but i swear she couldn't have been running with me if her foot hurt that badly before.

i know everyone has their opinions on health, especially around nutrition and exercise. but maybe i really am in left field. mb has decided that he doesn't know what i stand for anymore, based on my recent disclosure that i have been withholding feedings on my plants, because i believe based on their yellow- and falling-down-ness that their time in my kitchen window is coming to a natural end. mb is trying to force me to reinstate feedings because he believes i have no respect for my parsley's life. i would personally like to do the humane thing (plant-ane thing? plantain?) and put them more quickly out of their misery by sticking them on my porch to freeze, but can't for fear mb might put out a citizen's arrest on me.

the accidental yuppie.

my blogmate and i are self declared low brow types. we like our clothes from tj maxx and our beer in a can, thank you very much.
so after a somewhat successful jog (by which i mean that my perceived imminent heart attack didn't actually take place) we decided to return some of our more extravagant purchases at ann taylor and find a cheap sushi place for dinner...
by which we apparently meant going to buy more clothes at ann taylor and finding ourselves seated at a new, $10 martini, stylish bathroom (what is it with these new restaurants and their designer sinks?), sophisticated lighting scheme place up in lincoln square that was metromix's pick of the week.
not that we didn't love it. the clothes look good. the sushi was delicious. now i have some good conversation material for all my hypothetical dates.
but it seems that we yet again stumbled into yuppieness... and now we have to go find some PBR to drink in our flip flops to redeem ourselves.

the jock inside

we've all head of people with drinking problems, gambling problems, drug problems... people who are addicted to shopping, addicted to sex, addicted to chocolate.
i think i'm addicted to basketball.
let me clarify. i'm addicted to march madness.
i can't stop.
for 4 days i've walked around with my bracket in my purse- it's getting rattier by the minute, now all market up with the corrections i've made- who would have known that blindly guessing was a bad way to predict the tourny?
granted i made a few exceptions to the chaos by going for schools that have funny sounding names or that are vaguely close to my heart for historical reasons, but really i just guessed.
the guy at work who's running the pool told me that my bracket was "adorable."
maybe college basketball just enables my sitting around bars drinking beer and getting rowdy (and perhaps i also have a drinking problem), and maybe it engratiates me to my brother (blog to come about how i and all my highschool freinds were plagued by younger, more attractive, better-adjusted siblings)... but there's something about the thrill of it all, especially in those final minutes of the game that leaves me hungry for more...

as a sad postscript, i'll tell you about my discovery at the bucks game that feminists have a long way to go. during half-time they brought out a bunch of middle school basketball teams (boy teams and girl teams) for some kind of race to make baskets from the free-throw line. we were sitting in front of a row of obnoxious 10-year old boys and one of them kindly alerted his friends to his astonishing discovery- "LOOK! they're letting the cheerleaders play!"

family ties

i called home this morning for the weekly chat with my parents, forgetting the promise i had made to myself to lead off with a profuse apology to my father for leaving him a plastic penis water pistol to discover in his trunk on the way to work. he, of course, refused to let it go, and made sure to remind me that he'd found a plastic penis water pistol in the trunk of his car on the way to work, and also admitted that he felt quite compelled to torture me about it. i begged him to throw it away, but he remained steadfast in his refusal- he apparently prefers to leave it on the mantle in the living room, awaiting my arrival next week (intended recipient of plastic penis water pistol is getting married). in a last-ditch effort i pointed out to my dad that the plastic penis water pistol doesn't even work... although he sounded mildy disappointed, he didn't cave.

i can't quite bring myself to share this story with my younger brother who is in town for the weekend. we're pretty open with each other (i think) to the extent that every now and then the details of his romantic exploits get to be a bit much for me (you have to draw the line somewhere, and i say that line should be drawn way before "she didn't even want to mess around")...
and it's not like we've run out of things to do or talk about. after coaching me through the pounding of 4 beers in a half hour at a microbrewery in milwaukee we bought cheap tickets to a bucks game, during which he raised very complex questions like, "do you think the mascot has a day job?"

maybe i haven't given my family enough credit...

mycological madman?

more mushroom mysteries. is anyone else as fascinated by this?

yesterday i got home and found a second message on my answering machine, this time from tina, demanding that leon call her back immediately, but at a different number than the one that mike left a few days ago telling leon it was imperative to call immediately. i waited until after 5 and called the numbers both back to see what kind of voice mail they had, looking for clues. unfortunately, both numbers led to a very generic "welcome to academy services." so at least it's just one person who thinks i'm leon. next, i called the number back and hit zero for the operator, figuring at the very least they should tell me who the heck they are and take me off their list, and maybe if they're nice tell me if i should worry for my personal safety.

apparently nickelodeon and food network tv show hosting isn't very lucrative, because i had a lovely conversation with marc summers, who is the academy services telephone operator. marc told me the place was called academy collection services, and that should tell me what they did. he couldn't find my name or number anywhere on leon's account, but said that sometimes they do call neighbors trying to locate people, although he wasn't sure if that was why i was getting calls.

so i don't know if leon took my name off of my mailbox and looked up my phone number to try and avoid the collection people, or if it was just a random neighbor dial that happened twice in a row. marc implied that leon has multiple accounts with them by multiple clients looking to collect, and that maybe one of those clients had my number for some reason... i don't know. if i don't stop getting calls, should i call my landlord? or just cancel my land line altogether? is it sad that this is the biggest drama in my life?

the journey of a thousand miles begins with one plastic penis

act I:

it's like i always say- you haven't lived until you've traveled 1,000 miles witha suitcase full of plastic penises (peni?). after the orgy of yuppiness at ann taylor, i packed up little garden party dresses, strappy sandals, and collection of trashy bachelorette party materials and flew home for a weekend of polite bridal showers... and plastic penises (peni?).
i stood in line at the airport sweating bullets, wondering if i'd have the misfortune of getting pulled out of the security line to have the good people from the TSA discover my carry-on filled to the brim with scandaolous lingerie and adult party games (pin the macho on the man, anyone?).
i thought i'd made a clean getaway until the email came from my father. "it was good seeing you this weekend. your mother and i are constantly reminded of how proud we are of your accomplishments... even if i did find a penis water pistol in my trunk."
doh!

act 2:
now i've put the penises (peni?) behind me and moved on to more sophisticated endeavors...
march madness. as i obsessed over my bracket (after all, i've got a whole $3 invested) all day yesterday, i was reminded of a few fundamental truths:
#1) anything can become a crack-like addiction if you let it. i really couldn't care less about college basketball until i entered the pool... but i spent yesterday glued to various bar stools, starring in zombie-like fashion at the big screen TV's, pondering deep, meaningful questions like "where is old dominion anyway?" i'm totally hooked.
#2) it's all about the simple pleasures. sure i may work ungodly numbers of hours and have a dismally poor romantic prognosis, but damn it, i found the free pizza in wicker park and watched my brother eat half of a fried chicken surrounded my martini sipping yuppies.

at the end of the day, i think i'm managing to get a little wiser...
always check to make sure your plastic penises (peni?) are properly stowed for take-off and landing.
if the bride's medical career doesn't ever take off she can always be a porn star (she's got the wardrobe).
bars are more fun if you go there for a specific reason: pizza, basketball, chicken. oh yeah, and beer.

he said what?

unrelated, but true.

1. in a display of true family-centered-ness, mb told me yesterday that in the future he would like to have two children... because any more than that would get in the way of his plans to own a suit-wearing monkey.

2. this might only make sense to our midwestern blog readers, but during a talk this afternoon i heard the speaker describe one of his clients from fond du lac, wisconsin, as being from "a rough neighborhood north of milwaukee." i'm sorry, fond du lac?!? rough? while speaking on the south side of chicago??? fond du lac has 20,000 people, a main street complete with faux-wrought-iron street lamps, two perfectly good high schools from which people graduate and go to college, proximity to reasonably cultural attractions, and is as middle-america as it gets.

3. one of our favorite late-entry blog readers sent me a link to a ny times article essentially on religious nuts with blogs, suggesting that my entries speculating on my blogmate's leanings toward unitarianism might join the likes of gaycanadianfeministmormons.blogspot.com, or something along those lines. i'm so proud.

mycological mystery

our faithful readers will remember leon, my downstairs neighbor who subscribes to all of the mushroom magazines. so this afternoon on checking my answering machine, there was a message from some guy with a new-york-ish accent asking for leon. seems it is imperative that leon call him back immediately regarding a situation in chicago, illinois (that's illi-noise, not illi-noy). out of curiosity, i looked up leon's phone number, thinking maybe we had similar numbers and that this confusion would continue to happen, allowing me to continue spying on this fascinating fungus lover. but alas, it was not meant to be. so that means i only have this phone call to use... i'm trying to figure out how i can call this number back and tell the investigating party that i am not leon, but for some reason desperately need to know what's going on. i'm taking suggestions.

in other notes, i'm having angst about the previously mentioned pink party dress. the rest of the story, briefly, is that my blogmate and i were on a marathon shopping afternoon, one of the only shopping expeditions we've ever had that does not involve hunting clearance racks at t.j. maxx, and we had a blow-out at ann taylor loft on halsted. so many things fit me perfectly. one of them was a size 6 bubble gum pink party dress, complete with tulle in the skirt so it flares out a little. now, as one might gather from my stated interests of power drills and spying on leon, i am not a pink party dress kind of girl. but we were having such a fun yuppie (how do you spell a single yuppie? yuppy?) afternoon, and it was so nice to wander into starbucks with our arms full of purchases, thinking that just for this one day we could hang out with the trixies before going back to the organized-by-color racks at unique thrift... so i bought the dress. but now i'm realizing that the dress costs the same amount as a pair of shoes for work that don't hurt my feet or make my feet smell yucky (yucky? yuckie?), and so i'm torn. it's all well and good to feel girly and pretty in a pink party dress, but it's also hard to feel girly or pretty wearing smelly beat-up sneakers that need to be febrezed every night before i put them back in the closet. what's a girl to do?

how the other half lives

i've spent the last few days catsitting.

it's an arrangement that works well for all parties, particularly the cats. my rich married couple friends leave their fancy downtown apartment and their two rather high-maintenance cats under my care. i feed the cats (twice a day), refuel high-tech fountain-like water bowl and deal with the nasty litter box. in return i get to eat their food, use their washing machine, and watch their tivo. i also get to sleep in a bed that's WAY more comfortable than mine, use an internet connection that's WAY faster than mine, and, in general, life a life that is WAY nicer than mine.

except for the feline alarm clock factor.

come 6AM these cats are ready to go. what with the pouncing on me, purring, knocking things over, and overall obnoxious behavior encircling me, there's really no opportunity for the much anticipated snooze (they also live a good 10 minutes closer to my job than i do). this problem is aggravated by the fact that they have a VERY complicated coffee maker.

it's all a nice reminder that i like my low-brow life.

the sweet smell of relief

in accepting the sad reality that nothing exciting is ever going to happen to me, i've decided that it's time to start appreciating the little things...

for example, the apparent fact that drunk dialing takes on a whole new meaning once you're married. the other day i got a late night phone call (by which i mean 10PM, but for us that's late) from one of my more established, married friends (who had obviously thrown back a few) to the tune of, "will you pleeeeeeease come to costa rica with me someday? i really want to go and you know that blankety-blank [husband] won't ever come to costa rica with me. pleeeeeease???" so while i probably shouldn't hold my breath for marriage to a clown or an indian neurologist (side rant: is that really my idea of exciting?), i can at least be comforted by the fact that when my richer and more successful friend gets tanked she fantasizes about backpacking in central america... with me.

then there's the following saga: on the way to work the other day i heard this mysterious squeaking that sounded like it was coming from under the passenger seat of my car. the squeaking didn't line up with the other sounds my car was making and my extremely rodent-phobic self had the fleeting (but panic-stricken) thought of, "dear god please don't let there be a mouse in my car." i managed to get this thought out of my head ("how could a mouse have jumped up into my car") and forgot about it. until... a few days (weeks?) later i was driving to work (again) and was suddenly overwhelmed by an absolutely foul stench. "dear god," i thought, "please don't let there be a dead mouse in my car." i couldn't even bring myself to look, and decided that i'd rather live in denial. "maybe i can just never lose anything ever again and therefore never have to go looking under the seats in my car." come to find out a couple of days later that said foul stench plagued the ENTIRE city of chicago that day and that numerous people had called in with "it smells like something died" complaints. the source of the smell remains a mystery, but i'm fairly confidant that it wasn't emanating from my car.

so while i may not have won the lottery or been chosen to compete on the amazing race (another fantasy of my above-mentioned drunk dialing friend), and while i still can't pull off the pointy- toed-faux-crocodile- shoes-with-designer-jeans-and- slutty-camisole look, i can take pleasure in having convinced my blogmate that she NEEDED the strapless pink party dress... and that i can go back to losing stuff.

and while you're at it, my laundry is to your left.

it just goes to show you, worry is useless.
well, or maybe it just goes to show you, worry gets you things.

my weekend was filled with the easiest houseguests ever. my soon-to-be sister-in-law (who reads our friends' blogs as eagerly as i do waiting for a covert mention like in the society pages of a small-town newspaper: "mr. and mrs. albert johnson were seen playing cards at the home of edwin krieger last evening...") and her college friends descended on chicago for a weekend of reuniting and bridesmaid dress shopping. since i haven't seen her friends since college, i wasn't sure what they would be like or what we would do to entertain ourselves, since my knowledge of chicago nightlife is largely based on places where i can get pbr for $2.50 or less. perhaps just a touch classier? i thought, and wondered how a non-classy girl like me could pull this off. but my fears were unfounded - a fun relaxing weekend included the chocolate bar at the peninsula, gourmet pizza at my favorite wine bar, painless dress shopping culminating in a selection that looked good on everyone, delicious family-style italian dinner, lunch and witty conversation with my bro's best man and his s.o., a dancing hamster in a chicken suit (you know, typical wedding tradition). but the best part isn't really in those details... not only were there no disagreements, but i had to do so little as host that i'm fairly sure i was unnecessary. m was the dress decision-maker and shopping limiter (yay!), s was the professional style consultant, a was so good with logistics for a girl not from chicago i think i could have just let her drive and see where we ended up. they did my dishes, told me funny stories, verbalized happiness about being, well, anywhere...

for anyone out there who is considering a wedding and having bridesmaid issues, i think maybe you should just hire these.

do you ever wonder what your boss's house looks like? or if you're like most of us, your many bosses' houses? can you picture them according to their personality? one of our bosses is one of these santa-fe-fantastic dressers with the funky jewelry, long gray-white hair, perfect-though-heavy-ish makeup, and carries herself in that elegant way that you always know when she's in the room. naturally, i've heard her place in lincoln park is fabulous with lots of fancy art and possibly breakable things.

i like this stuff. so imagine my excitement when i found out my next career advising meeting with other-boss was at his house. completely different guy. you also always know when he's in the room, because he enters with a big "hi, kids..." for his various underlings. fleece jackets covered in dog hair, talks almost as fast as my blogmate, constantly quoting his own publications but in such a funny way it never occurs to you (well, it never occurs to me) that it's a little weird to be so self-referencing... so he's pretty well-known in his field, and his wife is a famous psychologist or something. their place? perfect for them. big old two-story, older-looking couches and chairs paired around not-new-but-expensive-looking area rugs, fireplace naturally flanked by thousands of dated books, fancy art side-by-side with huge sparkly collages of their children's accomplishments. kitchen with maybe 15-year-old appliances and white formica but equal exchange coffee and croissants from local bakery on understated-fancy copper serving tray. kids' soccer ball right next to souvenirs clearly from exotic travels.

does it take a certain amount of time or money to accumulate a household that matches your personality? i wonder what my own place says about me... cheap, likes hand-me-downs (or tolerates them and paints them orange), has an excessive love of plastic crates filled with outdoor toys that she doesn't use often enough, keeps books clearly from college classes on her bookshelf to make it look like she's well-rounded. needs more closet space, or to throw away more things.

love in the time of google

in my low-intensity stalking of the double indian neurolgists i have, at various points, googled them. it turns out that both of them have many many counterparts running around out there. for example, google "sujeet krishnan" and you get 6 million hits. a humorously large subset of these hits are for websites like "findagroommumbai.com." the point of this is that while, in my stalking, i've never come across any useful or interesting information about my "sujeet krishnan," i've found many other sujeet krishnan's who are "30, never married, and looking to settle down." i've also found that "sandeep pai" is a world-renowned expert in breast augmentation surgery, an IT consultant at IBM, and "a fine catch from good family."

if you can't be with the one you love... google him on the internet and love one of his clones .

the classic chicken-or-the-egg...

so i'm spending these few weeks at work in a department filled entirely by these weirdly-sarcastic-in-that-trying-to-be-worldly-to-disguse-their-dysfunction guys who are, well, weirdly sarcastic and dysfunctional, but also a lot smarter than me. which is fine, but i'm trying to get them to promote/hire me when my current job is finished, so i can't ignore them. i've been trying to learn what they're talking about, but it's hard to break in. in their free time they argue over whether or not the chinese revolution bears any resemblance to... hell, i don't know, i tuned out and started wondering if tonight's american idol competition would be as good as last night's was. (i don't care if it's not intellectual. the guy with the dreads is hot.) you can see i don't feel like i'm doing well breaking in on an intellectual level. so i tried sharing my frustrations about a recent conference i'd attended, in hopes they'd stop talking about china. this worked, to a point. i got two sentences in: "and i didn't understand where they were going because..." and smart-but-dysfunctional-guy number one (who also happens to be a spitter) interrupted to say "i love you. see, the real thing is..." and five minutes later was maybe still agreeing with my conference angst, but in such a way that i had NO IDEA what was going on, except that it involved a dislike of libertarians. but i'd started the conversation, so couldn't stop it. i just kept smiling and trying to hide my panic. eventually sbdg1 stops long enough to get the attention of sbdg2: "hey peter, she wants to work with us!" sbdg2 was unimpressed. i faked thinking i heard someone calling my name and left for a long lunch.

as sbdg1 says, "see, the real thing is..." see, the real thing is that i like what this group does, but this group is crazy. so which came first, the job or the crazy? if i take this job, will it turn me into a crazy? or is it just that only crazy people have wanted this job thus far?

i can't go back there. but i want the job. but i can't go back there. maybe i can learn a lot about politics? or convince them to get into american idol so i can have something to talk about?

love the one you're almost with

what would it say about me if, in my search for love, i decided to substitute one slightly nerdy indian neurologist for another?

i'm afraid i've done just that.

after swooning over the one for months and months and getting absolutely nowhere (the snag in the carpet was his insidious girlfriend) i stumbled upon another and thought, "what the hell, he'd never have to know that he wasn't the first."

not that there's really any story to tell about slightly-nerdy-indian-neurologist #2 either. like the other one, at best he knows my name and might stop to say hi if he ran into me at bar (assuming for a second that i actually went to bars occasionally and didn't just work, sleep, and watch dismally bad movies with my blogmate).

to be fair (to myself), there are subtle differences. slight-nerdy-indian-neurologist #2 is actually slightly more nerdy and than slightly-nerdy-indian-neurologist #1. #2 doesn't dress as well as #1, but to be honest, #1 dresses well enough to be off-putting (while the well-dressed young indian metro-sexual guy is a well-known entity in chicago, populating many a boom-boom techno club and dimly lit martini bar, he's never been quite my style). most importantly, i think my "in" with #2 is less tenuous (friend of a friend vs casual work acquaintance) and he seems a little more accessible.

i'd worry that i was sinking too low, but could this possibly be more ridiculous than my having fallen in love with a second clown?

are these the fruits of my labor?

my colleague and i have been working on a project for the last couple of weeks, and to reward our hard work our boss decided to take us to lunch today. or something like that...
what actually happened is that we mentioned to him a few weeks ago that we'd heard that he likes to bribe his underlings with somosas and we managed to convince him that we'd met criteria for somosa rewards. anyway, he showed up this morning and was giddly like a school girl when he found out that our 12:00 meeting was cancelled- "really?" he asked, "you mean we can have samosas today???"
first he took us through the secret (and to be honest yucky) back entrance. at the door, he laid out the rules: "the samosas are in boxes and there are 2 kinds. i think that chicken ones are really gross. the veggie ones have potatoes and are really good. most people but sauce on them but i don't- you'll probably want to. i'm paying for everything. get something to drink- they're spicy. they play rock music really loud in there so we so we won't be able to talk once we get inside. they always play rock music. let's go."
the place, by the way, appears to be the secret hangout of the shaggy grad students i so love, but i had to keep quiet about that over samosas with my boss, and instead just marvel internally at the wealth of broody comp lit students reading big books over orangina and tofu, feeling sadly mainstream with my clan of business casual clad professionals. at least we're cool enough to appreciate samosas in a dingy liberal arts campus basement...

well, it wasn't cannes.

what an intellectual weekend.

i can safely say that of the movies watched yesterday, undercover brother was the funniest and had the best plot and dialogue. sad, but it beat our other two lofty choices, soul plane and you got served. you got served would have been fine if nobody talked. overall highlight of the day: my blogmate and i sitting on opposite chairs during soul plane swapping a laptop back and forth while she was trying to fix my new job application (her: "this sentence is awkward." me: "i'm trying to sound dumber.") when mb entered the room, mistook her for me (he only loves me for my laptop?) and snuggled up comfortably at my blogmate's feet. i'm glad they're getting along.

somebody help me pick better movies next weekend.

in a collective attempt not to tell work stories here, i am unable to tell the much more interesting stories from my week with quotes like "what is that foreskin doing here?" and "if you do a girl and she not on the rag, do she get pregnant when you put you nut in her?"

sex in the windy city

here's a story: i'm at the drug store with one of my girlfriends the other day. she's got a small assortment of items, including a box of tampons, which of course, won't scan. "you don't know how much these are, do you?" "no, i'm sorry i don't." off goes the checkout guy to price check the tampons, as a massive line forms behind us. checkout guy comes back, followed by assistant manager guy (picture 20 year old college drop-out) who starts flirting with us, "why did you scare my cashier away," he says with cute smile, as said cashier is busily filling out the item description on the special receipt for the tampon mishap. my friend, of course, is completely unruffled, and find myself lost in thought, wondering if events in my life aren't starting to resemble those of a well known HBO series to which i am now addicted (minus the $400 gucci shoes and debaucherous behavior).

my super sweet laundry

have you all seen this cable show "my super sweet sixteen" on mtv (or some similar channel)? some richer-than-rich teenager is filmed during the week prior to his/her big bash. last night mb and i watched with disgust as this girl went to paris and whined that her mom wouldn't let her get some scandalous $10,000 gown for her ball, claimed that all of paris was ruined now because the versace store was closed, hated her parents for not getting her a range rover immediately upon her request, etc.

meanwhile, leading a similarly glamorous lifestyle, mb and i were cooking a fancy pot of 79-cent lentils while running outside in the rain, down the slippery back steps to the basement laundry room... where we found my neighbor leon shernoff pulling our things out of the washers. for those of you who don't remember, leon shernoff is my mushroom-loving star-trek-watching long-stringy-haired trench-coat-wearing neighbor in the basement. needless to say, i feel a little dirty somehow knowing that leon shernoff touched my unmentionables.

16-year-old ava was carried arabian-style into her $200,000 birthday bash by four shirtless members of the loyola polo team, while mb and i cooked beans and dodged the creep in the basement. some people just lead different lives.

who needs a valentine when you can have empanadas?

i've always thought of myself as the neurotic, excessively practical, organized type. but maybe i'm wrong- or better yet, evolving...

i didn't think that anything could ease the blow of being up at the crack of dawn on sunday morning after only a few hours of restless sleep (you'd think i'd have learned to drink water after drinking and not wake up at 3AM completely parched), but as i was packing up my bag to go to work, boy was i amused to discover that the bright green faux-alligator wallet that i bought for $10 at the discount store yesterday is j-lo brand! while i'd feel a certain amount of shame in knowingly acquiring j-lo accessories, i'm delighted (if not proud) to have done it by accident.

after the marathon of shopping with my blogmate we hopped in the car to one of our favorite low-brow hang-outs: the village tap in roscoe village (in keeping with our resolution to only ever hang out in bars with fire places). driving through boys town on the way there we were wildly gesticulated at by a wildy gay couple. i thought they were fussing at me for blocking the cross walk, and even considered that one of my headlights was blown, but i didn't figure out until later that what i had was a flat tire. so after activating the glorious AAA roadside assistance, we did what any respectable 20 something professionals would do- made a b-line for the closest bar. what we found was an extremely cute, trendy, and way-cooler-than-us tapas joint... after a delicious pre-meal of sangria and shrimp empanadas, with name of trendy, way-cooler-than-us techno spanish CD in hand, we watched the AAA guy change the tire and continued on to roscoe village for beer and fries. i tell this story to point on the following: we were actually happy to have suffered the flat-tire mishap, but for which we would not have found the cool new hang out (from now on we will only ever hang out at understated, candle-lit tapas bars) and had yet another night of drinking our way through an automotive disaster.

finally, i'll tell you that yesterday afternoon (before the shopping, way before the flat tire and the sangria) i was on the phone with a friend who was describing an acquaintance as being well-bread, well-educated and precise. without any attempt at the supressing the thought i heard myself respond, "i HATE precision."

have i become a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants optimist?

salsa geeks

you've all seen 'em. painfully white, earth-music-loving, tofu-eating, took-a-class-in-college-and-now-they-think-they're-latino folk who worm their way into the latin dance halls around the country, making us cringe with sympathetic embarassment.
i encountered these miscreants at the old town school of folk music last night- i went there in there in the hopes of recreating the same good feeling i had the last time (refer to "his name is wally and he likes to mambo" for the back story). boy was i disappointed! the lead guy would have been good as an afro-cuban salsa guy had he actually been willing to 1) stop talking and 2) play salsa. seriously, he wouldn't shut up about how we all need to love each other and love the planet and love cuba and love america. he occasionally interrupted his sentimental ranting to play bad songs that he had written or bad arrangements of good songs that other people had written. it sounded like elevator music and for-love-of-god he couldn't get in sync with his back up singer who kept on back up singing without the front guy singing. painful.
finally, there was the incredibidly unattractive shouldn't-an-afro-cuban-band-have-sex-appeal? factor. to the right was the middle aged white guy/ill-timed back up singer. in the back was the canadian drummer who had grossly miscalculated his hair into a slicked back pony-tail situation that made his head look VERY small. finally, on the right was the bass player who was just wrong. jeans too short. hawaiian shirt too hawaiian. hair too long. sunglasses too dorky. dancing WAY too badly.

fortunately, my faith in music and musicians was restored today by the arrival of a (drumroll) NEW HOT CLOWN who strolled around playing lovely guitar music, nearly lulling me to sleep, and certainly causing me to all but forget my former clown love.

there are no jews named peter, but there are two jews living in shreveport.

religion makes people do funny things. observe:

1) my blogmate apparently thinks unitarianism will help her remember to floss more often.
2) mb thinks jesus is a big hippie waiting to share a bong with him in heaven.
3) a former college roommate regularly announced that ash wednesday was her favorite holy day of obligation, even though the ashes made her forehead itchy.
4) another former roommate decided to be confirmed catholic as an adult, mostly so that she could request gifts of neon crosses and our lady of guadalupe candles from her hindu family.

me? much like my tendency to live vicariously through the much more interesting life of my blogmate, i accompany my friends on their religious adventures. for the most part, i keep quiet about my own opinions, not because i agree or disagree, but so nobody finds out my own thoughts are even more off-base...

1) i am anxiously waiting to accompany my blogmate to unitarian service, because i heard the classical music is good, and because i have a theory that unitarians are skinnier than average but have more-frequent-than-average receding hairlines and evanston-professor's-wife-ness, and i feel it's my job to scope the place for men for my blogmate while she gets her religion on.
2) although i truly believe jesus was more active in his revolutionary practices than your average bong-smoking hippie, i stand by mb's assertions, because i like to watch the fallout when unsuspecting fundamentalists try to save him.
3) i accompanied my roommate to ash wednesday services because she promised we could go out for lattes afterwards. but i washed off the ashes even though you're not supposed to, because i am terrified of breaking out and being left with a zit-cross on my forehead.
4) i bought a virgin mary candle from the latino section of my local supermarket to mark my friend's confirmation, and laughed a little, but it's my living room sporting the bobblehead jesus on the mantle. i can't put him away; he was a gift, and besides, i need him to guard the menorah on holidays.

yeah... happy ash wednesday, for anyone who's counting. what's your sacrifice? i knew a guy who used to give up swearing every lent by replacing all obscenities with the name of someone he didn't like ("i ann-burgess hate him so much! i'd like to ann-burgess his ann-burgess...") personally, i will be giving up spewing sacrilege online. right after this.

male pattern dilemma

so not to be mean or anything, but it's suddenly come to my attention that a large portion of the my-age-ish men that i come across (and consider stalking before noticing the wedding rings or discovering the girlfriends) are unambiguously balding.
my first instinct was to succumb yet again to the wrist-slitting depression that accompanies the repeated realization that i'm rapidly aging. yet again i ask myself if i'm doomed to choose between slightly revolting men or dying alone with my inevitable cats.
then again, maybe it's better to know about the baldness up front, becoming smitten by a slightly imperfect, a-little-less-shaggy-than-he-used-to-be grad student, bald spot and all, then it is then to wake up one morning to discover that the shaggy head of hair you used to love is insidiously thinning.

when life hands you lemons...

where's redemption when you need it?

in the spitty, foggy haze that characterized my drive to work this morning, double non-fat latte in hand as a monday morning self-indulgence, i got cut off by "mac dog 1," as designated by the license plate of the big-ass black sedan, driven by what i can only presume was a big ass. the insult prompted the need for more self-indulgence: hashbrowns and biscuit instead of whole wheat bagel. i swear i woke up this morning with the resolution to change my ways- floss more regularly, water the plants, not eat hash browns so often, make my own coffee, and for-the-love-of-god stop being so resentful and cranky. atheism be damned, i think it's time for me to start going to unitarian church already, lest i blame my misfortune on the superbowl- eagles losing, bad half time show, lame comercials, or my missing the post-game simpsons- take your pick...

how much "heartbreak" can one girl take?

first of all: a grammar rant. now believe-you-me i'm not one to correct anyone's grammar or spelling. most of the finer (and not so subtle) points of grammar are lost on me, and i seriously can't spell (unlike some people we know...). however, there are a couple of egregious errors that really get my goat. the sentence ending with a preposition thing makes me crazy. i heard it in a song today (by an angsty alternarocker who clearly ought to know better- i'm sure he went to college somewhere like amherst or pomona)- "we've got so much to be thankful for." it just sounds bad! but the winningest offense has to be the flagrant misuse of quotation marks. you know what i'm talking about. "fresh" fish. 3-garment dry-cleaning "special." "please" label your sample. i'm willing to concede that there are certain figurative uses of quotation marks, but nowadays people seem to use them for "emphasis."

in other news, i now know the clown's name, but guess what- he still doesn't know (or care) who i am. i think i'm just not cool enough to get his attention. i suppose that my obsession with someone who doesn't know (or care) who i am is some kind of marker for my complete lack of prospect, but shouldn't he at least process that i'm unabashedly staring him down? it doesn't help that a woman very senior to me at work totally one-upped me today by doing this crazy high speed run down the hall ending in a no-holds-barred slide into first base kind of thing. i know for a fact that she has no designs on my clown, but he certainly looked impressed. i'm also little worried by the fact that sliding woman is actually my official career advisor. is deliberate (as opposed to my current inadvertent) making a fool of myself to impress a boy what i have to "aspire" to?

zen and the art of toaster oven maintenance

i understand that many people who are interested in things like blogs are by necessity interested in things like technology. since my brother is one of those techno-engineer-gurus who can answer fancy questions like (and this actually happened) "hey, why won't my computer turn on? oh, wait, never mind... it's not plugged in yet," i understand that people like that are irritated by people like me who think that technological wonders happen at the whim of the circuit gods. but i can't help it. maybe it's that i don't have a lot of money and so my electronics are, well, not very good. but i regularly assign animist tendencies to my electronics. my blender is possessed; my stereo is a critic and prefers to play cake "short skirt long jacket" to any other cd track; my toaster is clingy and doesn't like to part with the bread for fear of loneliness; my stove is a minimalist and doesn't think i really need more than one burner; my refrigerator lacks self-esteem and demands attention with the chugging-rattling sounds it makes. even my brother, who has worked for very fancy technical companies, has lived with me and my bad electronics long enough to allow a certain degree of mysticism into my discussions regarding household appliances.

so imagine my surprise yesterday when my friend the figure skater, who happens to be a tech-buff figure skater, didn't nod indulgently when i suggested that my laptop's mouse track-pad had attention deficit disorder and couldn't be bothered with keeping my cursor in the same place on the screen while i typed. reasonable, no? no. apparently this is unacceptable, and there are drivers that fix such things. before i knew it, there was an installing and an updating and an adjusting of my preferences. and like ritalin, the driver now makes my track-pad stay on focus and do its work.

i am a reasonable person, and understand that from this i should conclude that technical problems have logical solutions. but i can't help wishing that my theory of animist gadgets is not only true, but that people could also have drivers. wouldn't it be lovely if we could just download patches for our acquaintances' loopholes? let me be the first in line to download a personal-space-preserver, an awkward-silence-blocker, super-hygiene-protection. where's technology when i need it?

what would brian boitano do?

so this afternoon i went ice skating with a co-worker who just so happens to be a former collegiate national figure skating champion who can't do triple lutzes right now because he's recovering from ankle surgery. so, sad for me. i would have felt so cool being the girl at the rink with the jumping guy. but even sadder for him, because instead of jumping and twirling, he was stuck on hockey skates with me, trying to teach me one of the more subtle moves in skating: turn left. there was a lot of "you know, it would work better if your feet weren't so far apart" and "ok, now try that while moving a little bit faster" and "yeah, i was trying not to notice that look of terror on your face." i am proud to report that all my limbs are still intact.

on the way back home, we were discussing the health care system's poor rationing of resources. it was hard for me not to laugh, though... i mean, rationing of resources? how about a national figure skating champion teaching me how to turn left? clearly i have more than my fair piece of the figure skating pie.

how the game is played

my blogmate and i suddenly seem to be in the matchmaking business. we set up a girl that we know (and like) with a guy that we don't really know (but we know is hot) with remarkable ease, a deed for which we were rewarded with gossip and cookies.

once the date was made we cornered our friend for some pre-date coaching and discovered 1) we're not the most clueless people around when it comes to rules of engagement, and 2) we're totally promoting hypocracy/double-standardness.

it went like this: first we gave very specific instructions about wearing booty black pants and furry (i.e. touch me) sweater with plunging neck line, smelling good, and having touchable hair. then we not so gently pointed out to her that video rental is generally recognized as a thinly veiled suggestion of, at very least, high-school like make-out session, if not groping and other activities more scandalous, and that no self-respecting girl would agree to first date movie watching on any couch of any kind.

first of all, doesn't EVERYONE know what "hey, let's rent a movie," means??? seriously- i know what it means and we all know how booming my love life is. as an aside, i should point out that video rental is a perfectly respectable way to address mutual wantingintotheotherspants-ness when you've already been on several dates, or when it's just not going to go the way of traditional dating.

then there's the question of why i would get her all hooched-up so that he wants to jump her bones but also prep her for the "hey, i'm not that kind of girl" talk. so much for progress.

getting ready for greatness

i don't know what it is, but in the throws of exhausted delerium i have moments of clarity that result in my pondering truly compelling insights and questions. stay with me:

1) do i really want a boyfriend, or would a puppy suffice?

2) when dealing with globally dysfunctional coworkers they be cohorted into three groups: lazy, clueless, or broken.

3) leftover pizza is really good.

4) now that i've finished both seasons of sports night on DVD what new TV series should i start to feed my heroine-like addiction?

5) how much do i love buying crates of clementines and eating at least 6 a day?

6) i am in no way, shape or form a mathematician or statistician of any kind and should not be subjected to multiple powerpoint slides that make their point (to someone other than me) by using many scary symbols vaguely reminiscent of calculus (if i was smart once the moment has definitely passed).

7) i will never be able to run a marathon.

8) no one is ever going to find me a shaggy grad student.

i swear it's like i'm some kind of visionary.

late night musings

now that mmmb is moving here, potentially disrupting me and my blogmate's blissful codependence, i've decided that i should

1) get to know him enough that i can kiss butt a little; maybe he'll not notice that he moved here to be with a girlfriend who is constantly occupied by my vaguely unstable presence; for example- while it kind of sounds like he's an architect or an urban planner, he's neither an architect nor an urban planner... or, my blogmate almost drowned on their first date...

2) find out what i stand to gain from his arrival, like, he has an eye for hanging posters or, will have a costco membership or, will fix my bike when it's broken...

3) take advantage of his new job and new connections to potentially meet other nonarchitect-nonurbanplanners and not stalk them, per se, but rather, crash their nonarchitect-nonurbanplanner parties (i guess #3 is really a subset of #2 but i'm giving it's own category so that my blogmate can have something to tell her mother)

4) employ him as my spiritual advisor as i travel down the path of potential unitarianism (otherwise known as more butt kissing)

for once my glass is half full...

resolutions of the unattached

1) i will not find a way to interpret all of my blogmate's postings as underhanded reminders that i have no love life to speak of (for example, i won't feel pressure to date more so that she can have something to tell her mother)
2) i will abandon all boy-snagging strategies that involve stalking of any kind
3) i will remain violently opposed to j-date
4) i will continue to recognize that the purpose of going to unitarian church is not to meet guys
5) i will strengthen my resolve to reject any and all men who are shorter than me

mother knows best

from tonight's phone conversation with my parents, i conclude that everyone is riveted by updates on my blogmate's dating life. i called them tonight to float the news that mb and i will be temporarily living together while he gets settled into his new job and figures out where to find an apartment that won't cost half his salary. their response?

"well, that should give you a reason to throw out that stupid orange desk in your hallway."
"by the way, how was [blogmate]'s date with that guy your friend set her up with?"

hmm. well, at least her dating life is distracting them from worrying about mine. not that i mention my blogmate's dating sagas to my parents often - i think this one made the highlight reel on account of his flying in to see her and making more money than god. again, clearly other people's lives are much more interesting than my own. so i said something brief like "nice guy, had a good time, but too short and bad teeth," followed by something general about where they were each at in life. my mother: "oh. why doesn't she just get him some clip-on teeth?" segue into monologue about bad-teeth-covers that hide a crooked smile and only need to be removed for meals, and how excited she is at the prospect of covering some of her bridgework.

so there's a new solution: instead of using the internet to find new romantic interests, just take an old option for a romantic interest and fix his teeth.

no stone left unturned

i walked into my office yesterday morning to the very excited announcement by my blogmate and one of the secretaries (the one who's always being hit on by one of our coworkers) that they had found the chicago rugby team.

i was enthusiastic about it. "i would love to play rugby!" i announced. it had never occurred to me, but maybe playing contact sports will make all my problems go away (as opposed to, let's say, j-date).

"no, no" they told me, "we don't want to play rugby, we want to gawk at hot rugby players." so i abandoned my new career as a rugby player and got on the internet to find out about the chicago lions rugby club. while there are no games until late march, there was the very friendly, and i'm sure personal invite to go hang out with the chicago lions at their favorite bar. you bet we're going to take them up on it.

so now i've created a little contradiction for myself. i won't look for love online because i think it's pathetic, but i will stalk the chicago rugby team, thinking that it will make all my problems go away. i'd be disapointed with myself except that this plan may actually be a step up from swooning over a professional clown, willfully going after an unhinged architect, or letting myself go gaga over new guy in the office without bothering to find out that he's a moron.

i have nowhere to go but up.

desperate plea

ok, look. i'm sure that you all mean well, but PLEASE stop telling me that j-date is the answer to my problems! for one thing, i'm only vaguely jewish and would no doubt be a disappointment as a nice jewish girl. while it's nice of all of you to remind me my current dry spell, i am, in fact perfectly well aware of my romantic prospectlessness. and finally, I JUST DON'T WANNA. i'm not saying that online dating is for losers, but i'm pretty sure that it's not for me. i'd like to think that my life is pretty full- after all, i have clowns to stalk, figure skating to watch, PBR to drink, and would someday like to take control of my electronic devices. now if you'll excuse me, i have WB shows to watch...

stay away from the water cooler

did this just happen?

so there i was at work today, talking with the guy who's one further up on the totem pole. nice guy, very laid back, gives me plenty of autonomy while still telling me what to do (good since i'm kinda new here), showing me pictures of his 4-year-old twins (so cute)... my blogmate calls to tell me about the lats guy at the gym being a show-off again, i start to laugh, work guy wants to know what's so funny. i try to explain. work guy starts to inquire into blogmate's dating life. i try to avoid situation politely by saying something like single, having been on some dates, trying to pretend like i don't know every miniscule detail. then work guy starts on monologue on how hard it is to meet people, and how he thinks my blogmate should, basically, use j-date. he actually logged on and started trying to find a good match, telling me he doesn't think romance is necessary, that arranged marriages are fine, and all you need to do is find someone to have babies with. he looked at his upcoming work schedule to find out when he and my blogmate would next be working together so that he could tell her there's nothing creepy about online dating.

i'm unsure how to receive this advice-which-is-not-really-for-me. on one hand, this guy might be a fun male gossip friend. he did tell some funny stories about his friend, the gay new york doctor who took a job in (of all places) neenah, wisconsin (minority, anyone??). or about exchanging cultural festivals with another friend in which his friend would join the jewish folk dancing and he would in turn march in the hispanic section of the gay pride parade. this makes me think he might be cool. however, he also told me at some point that he needs to dominate relationships and likes women to be submissive and that women don't often do the job that we do because the hours are hard and they are attached to their babies. this makes me think he might be less cool. i'm torn. i kind of wish i had been a little busier at work today.

darling clementines

even more amazing than my fascination with figure skating is the fact that one of my coworkers is a former competitive pairs figure skater and is willing to fuel my obsession. i burst into work this morning and made a b-line for him only to get immediately shushed with a "don't say anything, i haven't seen it yet!" he did, however, explain some intricacies of the figure-skating world (their dumb rehearsed speeches exist to mask their actual dumbness, for example) and offer up his competitive highlight real AND his own personal montage of disastrous falls- i can't lose!

more amazing still is that the showing off 18setsoflatpulls guy was at the gym today and i discovered that he has the same smirk, bad form on the lat pull machine and overall smarminess even when he doesn't know he's being watched.

the most amazing thing is that my MP3 player has found a way to screw itself up without my computer incompetent self doing a thing. why, oh why, did all the songs transfer in various states of duplication? bootyliscious is a pretty annoying song at baseline, but it becomes really annoying when you've heard it 3 times in succession. i'd skip to the next song but i don't know how.

girly enough for the both of us

so i don't know what it says about me that i spent my saturday night at home on the couch watching the national figure skating championships, much less that i have several formed opinions on the subject.

first of all, no apologies. i have an unabashed love of competitive figure skating.

dismal choice of music. not that i'm any kind of classical music afficionado, but it went something like: harry potter soundtrack, chicago soundtrack, disney's aladdin, weird new age beethoven medley, classical beatles compilation. seriously. there must be better stuff out there.

the sky cam thing was OK. you got to see some cool angles, but it was just unsteady enough to make me pretty dizzy and a little sick to my stomach.

speaking of queasiness, what else can i say about the montage of disastrous pairs figure skating accidents followed by multiple testomonies by past and present skaters against helmets, skull fractures be damned.

loved the chevy commercial with the two cars sliding across the ice, mimicking ice dancing.

hated, not only the peppy blond with perfect camera smile, stupid canned athlete speach, and skininess, but especially the repeated live commentary about how hot she is.

that settles it, i'm getting a life... tomorrow.

if beauty is skin deep, i'm screwed.

does anyone remember the skin care commercials claiming they had products specially formulated for three skin types: dry, oily, and "combination" skin which supposedly has a mysterious "t-zone" in which the nose and forehead are oily but the cheeks are dry? and that their (the skin care people's) products could balance such things?

does anyone believe this nonsense?!?

i work long hours in an old building that is alternately freezing, sweltering, dry and humid with apparent disregard for the weather outside. so maybe i can pin the blame there. but sometimes in the middle of a long day, when i step away to get a drink of water, i catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror and wonder how on earth nobody has suggested that i see a dermatologist. t-zone? can neutrogena come up with something that fixes a nose and forehead that are both oily AND dry (peeling greasies?) and cheeks that are neither oily NOR dry, but develop transient nightzits which disappear by morning? i've tried taking a face-washing break in the middle of the day, but it only lasts for an hour or so. i've tried just sopping up the greasies and covering the nightzits with some powder-foundation combo, but that just makes the peelies more prominent. and nightzits seem to be impermeable to concealer. so i've thought about trying to just have good hair to distract from the greasies and peelies, but i also have problems with furries - you know, curly hair pulled back into a ponytail which over time releases all the little pieces that are too small at the temples, making tiny little horns that shoot out on either side. i would pretend that the furries are intentional, but they tickle, so i keep swatting at them like mosquitoes, which no doubt exacerbates the skin greasies.

will someone in the cosmetics industry just give up the charade of all these customized products for skin and hair types that don't exist, and start a line of beauty products for working women who just can't keep it all together?

cellphone nation

yet again i find myself in an annoying, if not embarassing predicament because my electronics are smarter than me.

first there was the incident with the CD. my blogmate, thinking that she had finally found a way around the incompatibility of windows media player with my car's CD player, made me a proverbial mix tape the other day, and i was so excited to listen to it on my way home from work. not only did my CD player refuse to play it, opting instead to spin it around with that painful clicking sound, but it was so unappreciative of the gesture that it proceded to spit the CD right back out at me. what nerve.

round two is actually alot more disconcerting. i woke up this morning and plugged my cellphone into the charger to have it light up with the "missed call" screen. hmm, i thought, "i didn't hear the phone ring." i wouldn't have thought much of it but the number that popped up next was my ex-boyfriend's. i haven't heard from this guy in the better part of a year (his idea, not mine) and there's a whole other theme brewing about why i could even recognize the number as his after all this time. of course he didn't leave a message, and my crafty investigative work suggests that he called at 7:30 this morning.
having obsessed about this for the last half-hour, i've decided that it's really unlikely that he called out of the blue at the crack of dawn to patch things up. it's only slightly more plausible that he called because he's stuck at o'hare on account the awful weather and needs to be bailed out of some kind of air-travel conundrum. the most likely explanation has to be that he never took me off his speed dial and that his phone had one of those mind-of-it's-own moments and took it upon itself to call me. nevermind me extreme annoyance that he wasn't traumatized enough by our breakup to take my number out of his phone (because you know i did that the very day we broke up), but now i have to sit around wondering why in the world my evil ex is calling me in the wee hours of the morning.


technology: 2 me: 0

getting in touch with my... ?

after a year and a half, the time has come.
and i'm wasting it.

i moved to chicago for a job last summer, and have loved getting to explore a fabulous city and meet wonderful people i am proud to call friends. it has been a little bit challenging doing the distance-relationship thing with mb, but since we've both been busy, i had managed to keep to a relative minimum the where-is-this-thing-going when-will-we-be-together-again whining. for a while, every time he called, i was hoping it was going to be the call where he told me he was moving to chicago. naturally, no sooner had i decided to stop worrying about it when he actually did call and tell me he's moving to chicago.

let me pause briefly here: HE'S MOVING TO CHICAGO! very excited. but back to my story.

so i have a few weeks left of completely unadulterated girlie-ness without compromise- bring on the fruity drinks, hours-long gossip sessions with the girls ("I can't be-LIEVE he DID that to you... it's like, what-EVER..."), twice as many half-the-fat cookies, taking hours to curl my hair before leaving for the night. so how have i been spending my time?

1) burger and bloody mary while watching the packers get clobbered
2) admire my relatively new power drill and wonder what apartment project i could unleash it on
3) spend hours re-installing my mp3 collection after re-formatting my computer over the holiday
4) motionless in front of espn2 stunt dirt biking championships
4) tell blogmate that mb is moving to chicago, prompting the obvious response "now we have to hurry up and do the stuff we'd said we'd do before he moved here. now let's go drink beer at the map room in bucktown! and when are we going to slum it at jimmy's woodlawn tap or play fooseball at the pub over $1 pbr?"

yeah, i need to cultivate that feminine side a little. from here on out, it's all shoe shopping, pedicures, and decorating my apartment in cotton candy pink with bunnies.

looking for love in all the wrong places

i don't know what i find more surprising- that the brad and jennifer breakup has become unqualified headline news, or that so many people seem to be sad about it. i for one am delighted.
in my celebratory state (it is, on some level, now slightly more likely that brad pitt will marry me) i agreed, not only to watch the packers/vikings game with my blogmate, but to watch it in a bar over bloody marys. i had planned a busy afternoon at home trying to get my act together, but let's be honest, all i really do is shuffle clothes and papers around and don't actually manage to make the list any shorter. so off we went to my pseudo-neighborhood bar to drink knock your socks off bloody marys made with absolut pepper vodka with a splash of guinness- a steal at $4. while i love all things wisconsin and desperately want to care about the packers, i was mostly interested in the bloody mary.
so of course it was all a bust. the packers got clobbered, and boy did the bloody marys disappoint. we sat on the wrong side of the bar where we were attended to by someone who was obviously a barback and clearly terrified. he hadn't at all mastered the eyebrow raise and lean forward heyi'maknowledgingthatyouwantadrink maneuver and stood there awkwardly, too far away from us, so that we couldn't tell if we should order or not. we should have known better but we ordered our bloody marys anyway. no guinness, less of side salad in them as usual, and just plain mediocre, especially when we found out that the $4 drink special was off.
we decided to move back to our usual side of the bar but, of course, that meant we had to close out one tab and open another. turned out that was way too complicated for scared barback boy (who would seem way less out of place in a bookstore) and we spent the rest of our time trying to straighten out that mess. then came the mean waitress and the packers' humiliating defeat and our uncertainty about how to acknowledge the guy at the table next to us who we vaguely know from work. the blow was softened by the yummy fries... and vodka is vodka, even if it's entourage includes hohum bloody mary mix.
so rather than viewing the evening as a total loss, i've decided to extract the following learning points:
1) good, cheap bloody mary is better than bad, expensive bloody mary
2) attractive, slick bartender is better than stupid bar back
3) nice, funny waitress is better than mean, bitchy waitress
4) i will never get to root for a winning team and i might as well stop trying
5) there's still a chance for brad and me

searching for answers

how is gwen stefani allowed to wish that she was a rich girl?

who is this jojo person and why she is all over the disconceritingly wholesome pop culture for tweens magazine that i stumbled upon?

since when are ben afleck and jennifer garner a thing and how is it that i learned about from the girl with more face piercings that i can count without seeming obvious?

why do so many people think that the solution to my problems can be found on j-date?

when did tomatoes get so expensive?

how long does it take for insta-cookies to go bad?

hitting the ground running

with the new year just barely underway i've already got a list of things that really chap my hide.
1) entry level coworker falling all over himself to flirt with the secretary. painful to watch.
2) remember the overly groomed creepie? being forced to spend a week working with him. there are no words for how annoying he is.
3) people getting engaged, buying wedding dresses, having babies. enough already.
4) people getting paid more than i do to do my job, rubbing my nose in how much more money they make
5) losing two combination locks at the gym in the same week.
6) the innevitable coupling of very low-waisted jeans with short shirts that really does nothing for me.
7) senior level guy at work arguing with junior level guy across a meeting about whether or not jessica simpson is hot.

refining the resolution

otherwise known as reiterating some of the more salient points of this blog

6) stop entering my building every evening with so much crap that i can't fit through the door
7) vacation in bumblefuck alabama more often (more about this later)
8) reverse my magnetic effect on creepies
9) coerce more people into liking gilmore girls

things i've learned this year
1) those who need lifecoaches the most are the least likely to recognize their deficits
2) oregano needs to be watered occasionally
3) contact lenses don't do well when they are not surrounded by eyeballs or contact solution
4) palm pilots are not amphibious and are particularly ill-suited for toilet water
5) even without cable you can watch the simpsons 4 times a day
6) you can still get a perfectly decent drink for a dollar
7) there's no shame in drinking pbr from the can

dick clark had a stroke?

apparently i'm even more behind the times than my blogmate...
and feeling a little deflated. it seems that my love life is lackluster enough that it's improvement made it's way onto someone else's new year's resolutions (though arguably we spend so much time together that we can have collective resolutions).
anyhow.
every year i have the same, boring resolutions. stop biting nails. go to the gym. eat right. i think it's time i buffed them up a little. so here goes.
1) load up my MP3 player with music that is actually good. or really, not actively bad. even if it's for working out, there's no excuse for the amount of brittney spears on there.
2) spend more time in wisconsin. specifically, check out appleton (and the houdini museum), indoor water park, milwaukee brewhouse tour.
3) learn to drink bourbon, whiskey, and scotch without girly mixers.
4) find clown's name
5) befriend hotbutmaybegayindianguy in my building
6) fraternize with shaggy grad students

in other news, i'm a little disappointed in my blogmate's rendition of the bratgrilling story. as a rule she tells much better stories than i do, but i don't think that she did justice to our marathon of eating. there was something in the air that compelled me to suggest standing around in the cold with stupid hats on, drinking beer, staring at the grill (have i mentioned that i want to be from wisconsin?). somehow the plan snowballed into frozen eggrolls, postickers, brats, corn, upscale fries, lowbrow applecrisp and coolwhip. we sat around for hours eating what was, in retrospect, a really disgusting meal (delicious, but disgusting), totally engrossed in competitive highschool cheerleading. did i mention we were drinking heavily? clearly we lost all the style points we got for highbrowing the tiny lounge and having such a riproaring time in roscoe village the other night, but it was worth it.

then again, maybe the clown is a bad idea...

well, dick clark or not, 2005 is safely underway. sadly, i just realized that dick clark had a stroke, which i'm blaming for my lack of rockin' eve. apparently not so good with the news. i ended up working a late shift last night at work with everyone laughing at me for 1) not realizing about dick clark and 2) arriving 5 minutes late to the countdown just in time to see the mysterious meatballs on the buffet table getting cold and gelatinous, my co-workers already bored with the sparkling fruit cider, wondering what i could have possibly been doing that was more important than watching the ball drop. at any rate, my good blogmate pitched in this afternoon to resurrect my new year's day with a solid afternoon of watching girly tv (not that kind of girly movies! like when harry met sally and cheerleading competitions...) and making a low-brow new year's insta-food spread that would embarrass even the cabbage jello ring at mom's christmas table this year. oven insta-fries, insty-mini-egg rolls, potstickers, just-add-water apple crisp. top off the haute cuisine by grilling brats on the back porch while swilling beer, brat-flipping tongs in hand.

if it's true that the way you ring in the new year brings tidings for the year to come, i am in for some fun. with that, anyone for some resolutions?

1) harass my new co-worker who used to be a collegiate national figure skater for scandalous details on the behind-the-scenes skating world including who is gay and who just wears terrible spandex
2) try to find incriminating footage of said co-worker wearing embarrassing spandex
3) convince blogmate to continue boy-crazy adventures like hanging out in bars in ukrainian village on tuesday nights just in case the work clown she lusts for might stop by, not so that i can meet the clown, but so i can go drinking on tuesdays
4) more: margaritas, jameson, pbr, sunday bloody marys
5) less: banana flavored martini
6) more: instant asian food with suspicious but tasty mystery meat filling
7) less: cabbage-filled jello ring
8) more: fun
9) less: embarrassing myself at work by using the word "poop" while consulting with a more-important-than-me colleague before realizing i'm on speakerphone
10) more: bars filled with fireplaces, furry couches, or polite men cheering while watching gymnastics competitions
11) less: bars filled with guidos, frat boys, middle aged men all dressed the same
12) consider running chicago marathon
13) consider leaving my couch