Is there a Moral Majority in the Lake of Fire?

Because he spent most of his life suggesting that gays, women seeking abortions, Tinky Winky, atheists and Muhammed were going to hell, I sincerely hope that Jerry Falwell had a chance, in the split second second before his huge, congested heart stopped, to reflect upon his life full of vitriol and hate and wonder if he was headed in that direction too.

Farewell, Falwell (Ha ha, alliteration puns. What a perfect parting gift for a hated man, my most hated form of humour.) , you crazy bastard. I hope you made some people happy in your lifetime because for a lot of people, you were a a beacon of racism, religious intolerance, and insanity. But hopefully your dog and grandchildren liked you.

I have to believe this is not true.

Apparently smoking and drinking coffee protects you from Parkinson's disease. How can this be?!!
I know that compared to smoking-related diseases, Parkinson's is quite rare. And it might have something to do with dopamine: the great neurotransmitter associated with food, sex, drugs, etc. People who develop Parkinson's tend to have a low-level of dopamine-creating cells in the brain, and consumption of coffee and cigarettes (that sounds so nice) stimulates dopamine production. Does that then mean that depressed people (sigh), who sometimes have an imbalance in their dopamine levels, also have a greater chance of developing Parkinson's?!

Couldn't they hide that little scientific finding? Don't give smokers any more reasons not to quit, for god's sake.

Clearly, day 46 of quitting smoking has been a hard one for me. I'm double-fisting coffee.

Read the article here.

In Memoriam

I remember reading Cat's Cradle when I was about 14, and I barely understood all the allegory and strange flights of fancy, but I have always been a science geek/groupie, so I really dug it. There was a collection of short stories too, Welcome to the Monkey House, that I loved. Mostly because there was a seriously mushy love story called "Long Walk to Forever" that I made everyone I knew read; I remember that my sappy-hearted friend E.A. cried her eyes out... I just read an article in the Post in which Vonnegut said that he wished more adults read his books. So in his honour, I just bought Slaughterhouse-Five and will read it and love it as an adult. Anyways, because he was a great writer, irreverent, and brilliant, he will seriously be missed. Hope you're hanging out with spacemen, Kurt.

Dark Victory, or a list of good things from the past 12 hours.

yes, i know this is from Now, Voyager.

I like Dark Victory because of all the cool smoking and melodrama. Just because I quit smoking doesn't mean that I don't still love it. (Pause to pop a Commit lozenge in my mouth.)

I like the candy that has a hard candy/utensil that you lick and dip into a bunch of crystalline, flavoured sugar. Lick, dip, tweak!

I opposite-of-like puns (shut up to boyfriend, Blackfoot, and Will), lamb cooked in any form (sorry, newly-risen Jesus, for eating your flock) and any perfume that is supposed to smell like the 'Orient'.

I like Nightmare on Elm Street and flan and maybe, I like the Sopranos a little bit.

I thought that my first blog after having my identity corrupted by Google's lame bid to take over the world would be hard to write, but I forgot that I just have to talk about myself.

I like talking about myself.

It burns!

Things that give me a burning sensation:


1. Commit lozenges
2. Park Slope


Because no one gets tired of Park Slope douchebag stories...I was sitting on the 5th ave bus (urgh) and the twat next to me was talking on his cell to a 'friend' (like he has friends with his adidas tearaway pants and Muscle Milk (I tried to peek inside his shopping bag for confirmation of douche status; that's what I imagine was inside)) about how his other friend's girlfriend was 'SO annoying'? Why was she SO annoying, you ask? Well, apparently she looked like trailer trash trying to look posh (for Park Slope?) and even though she had been to Europe, she had the gall to order 'pie-ella' at a Spanish restaurant. Muscle Milk's girlfriend was horrified. I was horrified that he had a girlfriend. What's more, he was apparently shopping for a ring for her today. So if anyone out there is a snob about paella and is dating a snotty loser with no neck and a bag full of steroids, watch out. You have a lifetime of bus passes and misplaced elitism waiting for you.

Yeah, I'm a chronic eavesdropper/judgmentalizer...what of it?

clambering to the top of the moral high ground...out of breath

lame, I know. But maybe it was cigarettes that made me cool?






I just quit smoking. 4 days! Doesn't sound that impressive? Well, it's not. But it's something.

Things I am grateful for (not an AA-higher power way):

1. Super-great smelling room
2. Sarah not getting lung cancer (I bet her stupid rotten tooth was because I smoked) 3. Only 10 years until my lungs are almost all healed, hoorah!
4. That if I ever make it to 80, I'm totally going to start smoking again. And maybe I might develop a hardcore drug addiction. I totally thought of this before stupid Alan Arkin. I would never wear a leather vest. 5. Commit™ lozenges. Though they taste like poison, they are precious to me.
6. Crossword puzzles. I do them to occupy myself, obsessively. My mind will be a well-honed ('hone' is a very good crossword word, as is, strangely, the German city Essen) Trivial-Pursuit fighting machine! 6-letter word for not just a river in Egypt.

At any rate, another one of my very closest friends had a baby. Clark! Welcome. Wilkommen, as in Essen. We love you with your perfectly-round head, swirly hairline, and oily eyelids. You were the same day I quit smoking, so stop being so self-centered and focus on me. You would if you could focus, you little underachiever.

Apocalypse watch: Sign #23249

I think I'll watch the skies for the rain of fire after reading this.

Resolutions

No, I'm not quitting smoking...quite yet. But I do resolve to blog more, just for my own sense of consistency and responsibility. And also my loyal readership (2. Small, but vocal!) is scandalized at my slackerness.

So I've really been trying new things lately. Like yoga almost every day, a financial budget for the first time in my life (v. pathetic) so that's good, right? I thought about trying to be a nicer person and not write mean emails about amputees on the subway who take off their prosthetic legs and then talk about their raging infection sites, but then I realized that it was my horrifyingly confused Christian upbringing rearing its ugly head again so I beat it into quietude. Resolution #34242: Suppress Christian upbringing more regularly.

Om, shanti shanti.

snapshots from the north

I'm back from the great white north and back to my old habits of drinking wine on a Friday night and watching an ANTM marathon. Thank god. My parents are major health freaks and keep saying something about cigarettes and exercise. I don't remember exactly.

Home was great. It's funny, I thought I could never live anywhere else, but now Toronto seems kind of foreign to me. It made me very sad, because my best friend and my sister both live in my old neighbourhood and they know all the good sandwich places and I really feel like life is going on without me. Queen St., which used to be the mini-Williamsburg of Toronto is now filled with glossy Zara storefronts and there's a whole new minimall that popped up across from my parents' street in the burbs. Well, minimalls do pop up I haven't been home for a year, but still. And today, when I was perspiring on the F train in 62 degree weather with some old woman giving me dirty looks because I was trying to share her pole, I felt pangs for the TTC. This picture was taken at around 11pm on a weekend. Sigh.

I'll just continue on with my nomadic lifestyle, I guess. Maybe in a few years I'll look back at Brooklyn, from my perch in the hippest neighbourhood on Mars, and think it's way over.

Yay Caridee! Go on with your crackhead self.

Happy Day!

I'm around for another little while longer! Thank you, American government (words that usually taste like ashes on my tongue). I'll keep spending, paying my taxes, having terrible health care coverage and loving it, and not be able to vote and living in a hovel in Brooklyn (what what) and you keep approving my visa applications, okay? Clearly a higher power wants this (see above).

For menorah's sake...

I'm trying to find an appropriate Hanukkah present for a middle-aged couple who have everything. I don't know them well enough to give them this, but wouldn't it be fun if I could? I'm just going to end up sending them a big bag of chocolate candy
(gelt, I love learning new words) that will invariably melt in the mail into a big pile of golden-flecked chocolate seeping through packing materials and then they're going to shake their head (middle-aged couples only have one head), wipe smeared chocolate off their hands and shiny floors and think of the many Jewish girls their son could be dating instead but I'll be laughing because I'm totally converting him into a Zen Buddhist. What a shanda.

Shamefully excited

Anton Corbijn is making a biopic about Ian Curtis and Joy Divison. Some kid, Sam Riley is going to play him. He's a bit too dishy, but it works.

I think "Love will Tear Us Apart" is one of the most-covered songs ever. This is kind of awesome, but then I read that U2 touched it with their tentacles of lameness and performed it with Arcade Fire. Shudder.

You know it's time to do some wikiresearch...

When your company is installing RSS readers on your computer and you don't even know what it means except for trying to panicked-ly trying to close Firefox and iTunes before Sparky with the clipboard erases my hard drive. Our IT department gave an indepth orientation on Outlook when I first started here, to give you an idea of their tech-savvy.It's like reading Rolling Stone for the latest in indie music.

Even though this week is the CareBears National Care Week, today I:

1. Got yelled at by an unCaring author.
2. Got almost knocked over by an old lady in front of Whole Foods, causing me to stumble into my own hair with my cigarette. I lost a 2-inch tress.

According to the Care Calendar, I was supposed to hold a door open for someone today. Instead, my hair smells like burning hell.

the gayest thing I can think of...


Alright, enough already. There's a NY Post cartoonist, Sean Delonas, who is seriously burning my ass. I won't do him a service by reposting his cartoons here (for my legions of readers, holla!) but his homophobia manifests itself in low-quality art that is:



1. Sophomoric.
In a ruling on Wednesday, October 26th, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided that gay couples are entitled to the same legal rights and financial benefits as heterosexuals. To commemorate the occasion, Delonas busts out with some sophisticated, subtly-messaged comic art...Really? Gay people fuck sheep? Or do frat boys fuck sheep?


2. Unfunny.
It's very creative to dismiss a woman's qualifications for office by making reference to her physical appearance. Yes, Jeanine Pirro is pretty vile (and Republican (!)), and is under investigation for misappropriation of public funds (she wiretapped her philandering husband to find evidence of his philandering), but it's comforting to know that a bigot like Delonas will always get personal, in the least interesting, easiest, and most insulting way. At least bigots are consistent. In their fear of women, that is.


3. Very wise.
He seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of gayness. For example, in this cartoon, we have a mincing Jim McGreevey (foot up in the air, apparently wearing a ballet slipper) trying to comfort a weeping Mark Foley (fucker). Now for the real genius, which, as always, is in the details. There is a cocktail with a supergay umbrella in it on Foley's desk, a painting of the Village People on the gay-amoeba-flocked wall, a gayly-empty hamster-cage (hamster suspiciously absent), and the pièce de resistance . . . through a doorway, a darkened bedroom is visible and on the bed is what appears to be a teddy bear (gay) or sheep (spouse/partner, see above) with a big black dildo. I kind of like the teddy-bear/dildo imagery, it's like something out of a high-school zine my friend used to have. Delonas's id is a frightening place, filled with frothing waves of crazy.


Now, write a letter to the Post that won't get read, get drunk on the pinkest cocktails you can find, wear a feathered boa and red heels on Halloween (like I don't always wear a boa and red heels), drive up to Westchester, and shit on some Republican lawns. Film it, call it "Oppression No. 3432: Proustian dreams", post it on your blog. Thanks to viral video, you get discovered, get a book deal, and get paid. Now that is gay.

Welcome to the world, little Yariguies brush-finch!


Scientists discovered a new species of punk-rock-plumaged bird in an undiscovered bit of Andean cloud forest this week, and now the area is going to be a protected national park. Hoorah, little one! In a week filled with terrifying nuclear testing, an assassination of a journalist, and planecrash scares, Orhan Pamuk and this cool-ass bird were the only bright spots. Oh, and the arrival of Carlos, of course! Welcome to the world to you too, peanut.

three cute blue-eyed cubs=one angry tiger stranded on boat

The New York Times is all about trendspotting. You don't say, people use this thing called craigslist for more than just sketchy apartment rentals? Really? People still care about looks even though it's online dating? I think they should do an article about super-snobby subway reading. There are the Post readers (would be treated with barely-veiled scorn, maybe by Michiko herself), the Metro readers (desperate) the Times readers with the intricately (inexplicably!) folded paper turned to the Travel or Books section (professors taking the train up to Columbia, core audience) and then there are the various types of book-readers. Man reading dog-eared Colette? Perv looking to impress . . . impressionable young hipster girl with headphones, who is reading Bukowski but wishing she was reading the new Jennifer Weiner book. Legions reading fat paperback Left Behinds, Zane (et al.) and Terry Goodkind novels (they live in different universes (red states?), critics can't be expected to explain them) . . .

So, according to the Times, the F train is the intelligentsia train, chock-full of aspiring writers and acclaimed novelists (I'm sure someone spotted one of the Jonathans once. I've only spotted Jon Heder and Ana Gasteyer, so it's become the nonstop laugh-track/body odor/unwashed hair/eating large containers of chinese food train to me). I would link you to the article but unfortunately, it's Times Select. But man, is the teaser exciting. So what happened to me on this genius train, finally reading Life of Pi? I actually got a scornful look by some guy reading Notes from the Underground. Please. That was so 1995. Or 1864. At least I was wearing black nail polish when I read it. Whatever. I'm not going so far as to endorse some sort of populist view on literature, because really, it's not for everyone. If it were, we would live in a different sort of world. Platonic? Fascist? We'll never know. But you can't deny that people do check out each other's reading material, just like we try to sneak a peak at each other's iPods. And we make judgments. But everyone should get a get-out-of-jail-free for subway reading, since we're really reading so we won't have to focus that someone's hand is resting on our asses and our heads are cradled gently in some guy's armpit. So, whatever looses you from the bonds of reality, whether it be Dan Brown, lurid headlines or Russian existentialist literature . . . go for it. But, I bet the woman reading the steamy romance novel is escaping from her surroundings a lot more effectively than you, Mr. Dostoyevsky. If looking up every other word in the dictionary interrupts the narrative flow, I guess you'd better get back to imagining that pregnant woman naked. Good thing you didn't offer her your seat.

Did you know that the saying egg-sucking (and the reverse, which I used to use as a pretty big insult as a kid, e.g. Your Red Rover technique sucks eggs!) can refer to the practice of dogs who steal eggs on chicken farms? Of the many things I've learned from Johnny Cash--Juarez is DANGEROUS, you can't build a luxury car from stolen car parts, and frost on cotton leaves means that you're in the South--this one is the most useful. Because while telling someone to go suck an egg (or eggs) can mean something really lewd, that's really not the way we meant it when we were screaming it in the schoolyard. And it's always nice to find a curse that doesn't involve fellatio. G.M., tormentor of my elementary school years, (sigh, did you know how much I loved you, with your puffy hair and yellow adidas shorts?) you're a dirty old egg-sucking dog!

stewart and colbert in '08! Scorn and Zegna suits all around...

And the dork-girls in glasses go doo doo doo, doo, doo, doo . . .

It's not like he said, "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."




(Oh Sherman, when am I going to do a book about you?)

I want to be in a band when I get to heaven...



I went to see the Shins at Mccarren Pool yesterday, and they were really great, even though they played 3 new songs, "the bane of the concertgoer's experience". And the best part of the night was that they forgot the words to New Slang at first, which was awesome, especially if you're a fan of the Shins pre-Natalie Portman and her fucking headphones. I feel that head-bopping and back-and-forth swaying are the dance moves most suited to the Shins, don't you agree? There was a lot of unselfconscious bopping and big smiling going on last night, which was nice.