Friday, May 15, 2009

The birthday sticker assault

I know you guys would rather see photos of the fictional skinny-dipping incident instead of the very real sticker attack however I can't seem to find them on my camera! My camera erased the fictional photos! Stupid piece of technology!

Seasons of chickenhood

Earlier tonight I saw my age written down somewhere and thought, "I'm sure as hell no spring chicken," because that's how I talk to myself and then I started wondering why you never tell anyone they're a spring chicken when they are in fact a spring chicken? You're never like, "You're just a spring chicken!" Instead you tell them they're whippersnappers or young'uns or babies or annoying ambitious assholes who are too young to be acting so entitled. You know? And yet a whole season or more of spring chickenhood will pass by and the person will only discover that they never appreciated their state of young chickenhood until it's too late, and they are no longer ripe and are instead mature and long in the beak, their feathers thinning and their comb flopping over and their chicken feet looking worse for the wear and no longer lucky. "Don't tell Gladys, but she's no longer laying eggs, she's just sitting on rolled up socks," they'll cluck to eachother in the henhouse when your name is Gladys and you sit on socks waiting for them to hatch. Personally I never count my socks, but that's because I put them all in one basket.

Anyway, just wanted to share some late night thoughts about chickens.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Stand up versus TV

Sometimes my body gets really ambitious and instead of adjusting back to New York time from California time my internal clock jumps ahead to Chinese time. How else to explain the way I stayed up all night and then threw myself off a bridge because I haven't given my husband any sons? How else to explain the way I stayed up all night and then ate fortune cookies? How else to explain the way I stayed up all night and then did a shot of lead paint? I don't know which vaguely offensive cultural stereotype to go with here. What I'm trying to say though is that I stayed up late and then slept late because I'm still on California time. Let's leave China out of this.

So last night I did stand up and it was fun and it was great to meet some fans who made the trek! I hope I was just as delightful in person as I am in... oh who am I kidding... of COURSE I was!

Um, so here's the thing. You'll hear people say that with stand up you get immediate feedback and instant gratification because you know right away if people are laughing or not and then you can base your relative self-worth on this. (I added that last part.) But see, as a veteran TV appearer-on and a sort of stand-up neophyte I can say that this is malarkey and hooey and bull honky and baloney and a barrel of lies and a cask of untruths and a spool of inaccurate thread and a sweater sewn out of yarn that tells tall-tales and, well, you get the idea.

Unless you don't? Because I could go on.

Side note: In California my friend Mikelle was bit by her mom's parrot and then Jodey started making jokes about how the bird is into MMA and ultimate cage fighting and then a little while later I was like "Yeah, it does cage-fighting!" which I suddenly realized was funny because birds are in cages but apparently that's what Jodey meant when he made that same joke minutes before.

But back to how I'm sort of funny: from the stage it's kind of difficult to hear the crowd reaction. Was I carried off the stage on the shoulders of the crowd? No. Did people laugh? Yes. Did they throw tomatoes? No. Did they throw cold cuts? I wish! And so I felt like I did well but like I was barreling through the material for the first 3/5 of the set and really only kind of was in the moment for the last 2/5. Say what you will about me, but I'm good with fractions.

And then after I sat down and felt this gaping neediness along the order of "will someone please validate my existence?" which I can tell you, is a very attractive feeling to have. I'm surprised more people weren't lining up to get sucked into my yawning desperation vortex. I mean, I concealed it, but it was there.

With TV this isn't so because you actually do get instant feedback because first of all, you can tell how you did or rather, I've been doing it long enough to pretty much know right away how I did. Then there are all sorts of producers and other people who'll tell you how you did. And then you can watch the tape and see how you did. Am I coming off as completely irritating right now?

The problem arises when you suspect you did crappy but a producer is saying you did a great job but you sense they're just being nice. That might result in a car ride home filled with doubts and What Am I Doing With My Life?s.

Which is why I really should be doing something or other for me, and not for the reaction, and yet when my life's passion is to cook sugar free meringues and share them with the world, tell me how I'm supposed to hide that light under a bushel? You know?

Oh, in other news I need to write another McSweeney's column wherein I give advice about life and career and money in a satiric fashion. Maybe I should answer some questions and boss you around? Put your financial/career/recessionary questions in the comments, won't you?

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Drawers; Drew Toal

So I'm back in NY and I haven't unpacked yet but there's something I need to say before I do that and also I'll probably need to sit around for awhile and possibly I'll never unpack. I just don't like unpacking. I don't really like packing either. I've got a problem with things. I never quite know what to do with them and I have trouble getting rid of them. Over the vacation I was hanging out with the friend I dubbed Phil in the last post, although I could totally tell you it was the friend I dubbed Collins because seriously, how would you know? He had this bank of very small drawers with tiny things inside them. Tiny Tabasco bottles and those runts candies and teacup poodles and thimbles. Actually they were thimble poodles. They're so cute but I can't help but feel sorry for them.

Actually, none of those things were in the drawers. I don't really know what was in the drawers, probably nails of various sizes and washers and thumb tacks and twist ties and earring backings and paper clips and Q-tips and cotton balls and perfume samples and ribbons and very small scarves and packets of Splenda.

Oh! Speaking of, my landlords who are the best landlords ever got me a Facts of Life DVD and a book of recipes featuring Splenda for my bday! Aren't those the best gifts ever? They are!

So back to the small drawers. I looked at this bank of drawers and felt so calm and relaxed looking at it. It was like a waterfall screen saver or nature sounds. It was the organizational equivalent of a rainstick, except rainsticks are cheesy and make me think of didgeridoos, which are noisy.

I was so profoundly affected by the small drawers that I thought to myself, "Self, take note of this and do the equivalent in your New York apartment."

As I write this I'm sitting inside a small drawer and to my left is my sleeping drawer and to my right is my showering drawer. The only thing is that it's kind of difficult to use the bathroom in the middle of the night because it's hard to open the drawers from the inside and once you manage to get the thing open you have to throw yourself over the edge and then cling to the whole bank of drawers and then, because they all look the same from the outside it's easy to forget which is which. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

Wait, none of that was what I meant to say. Damn!

What I meant to say was that there's this young whippersnapper with whom I worked at Time Out New York by the name of Drew Toal who has informed me that he wants to challenge my media empire. "It's lonely in the upper quadrant of the lower middle," I warned him, but there was no getting through to him. He has a blog and I'm remiss in not linking to it so go there and get to know him.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

More about my bday and unread mail

I came home tonight to 236 unread email messages which would be kind of overwhelming if I weren't so used to being important. "Holy crap, I haven't dealt with this many unread messages since I came back from the war and also since that time I had surgery," I fibbed to myself, having neither been in a war nor had surgery. I mean, occasionally I've engaged in mindgames so ferocious they almost qualify as a war, but that didn't affect my inbox. And I had oral surgery to bring down an impacted cuspid but that was before the invention of email. Oh dammit there I go again with the lying. I don't know if I'm coming or going sometimes.

So yeah, loads of email and also, I'm officially old as of tonight. You wouldn't know it to see me though since I exude such a fuckload of joie de vivre. In fact I'm giving off so much joie de vivre that the nation of France formally wrote to me and asked that I go easy on the joie because I'm overdoing it. What nerve, right? I mean, one man's overdoing it is another man's doing it just right. But whatever, I know it's hard to keep up with me and my vibrating chakras.

Last night I went to Detroit (the club, not the Motor City) with a couple friends who I'll call Phil and Collins, for reasons I haven't quite figured out, and at the stroke of midnight which was my birthday they put stickers on me and then we played the world's longest game of pool because we all suck. I imagine Phil would disagree since he beat Collins and me but only but a pair of balls. Collins and Phil also wore stickers because if I was going to walk around like an idiot covered in stickers I wasn't going to be the only one. I saw Collins tonight and he still had stickers on the back of his jacket and this morning I woke up to find a sticker on my sock. By the way, they weren't even birthday stickers. They were Batman stickers I think. "I'm so glad you went along with that," said one of them, I think Collins, because they're always surprised when I decide to have fun instead of sitting on the sidelines quietly judging everyone. Not really, however they have taken to calling me a "show pony" based on the considerable hair and makeup time I require and so they're always surprised when I agree to sleep under keyboards and walk around wearing stickers. One of them made me run in the street just to see if I could do it since he claimed he couldn't imagine me running. "I run like this!" I yelled, swishing my hands back and forth and doing a weird sort of skipping/shuffling/jumping kind of thing. It's not really how I run, but then, how a woman runs is a very personal king of thing. Sometimes it's like they don't know me at all. They've also taken to letting me know how horrible my driving is, which is kind of true, except I let them know that the constant hectoring was in fact making my driving worse, a point made all the more poignant when I literally almost got in an accident because I was thinking about my hair. I only wish I were joking.

So then tonight for my actual bday a group of us went to a seafood restaurant and the crazy thing is that some of these friends went to dinner for my bday ten years ago, that's how goddamn old I am. My friend Bret and I reminisced about how we were going to form an X cover band for an afternoon and then there was other reminiscing and then I forget what happened but I know at some point I began yawning because that's how filled with joie de vivre I am. Then we went to Detroit, not because we really wanted to but because we couldn't figure out where else to go. Oh wait, before that went spent a long time outside debating whether to go skinny dipping. I explained that it's so like me to do that and that seldom is there a party where I'm not whipping my clothes off and jumping into a body of water. Sometimes even a bathtub or puddle! Also, I'm not sure why I'm concealing the identities of Phil and Collins, probably since I'm bored, but for the extremely careful reader and even the haphazard reader, Collins has appeared in this blog previously in various incarnations including as Toilet Duck.

Where was I? Oh yes, I was old. So then I decided to leave and I didn't even give into sentimentality too much. Am I crying right now? I'm not actually. Not at all. Tomorrow I fly back to NY, back to all my NY friends whom I'm excited to see. Hopefully we can go skinny dipping.

Oh, and I'd like to give a big fat sticker-covered shout out to all of you who are awesome and who make me smile and whose comments I adore and who are the most loyal internet bunions a gal could have. I know I may not give the individual shout outs as often as Anna but I talk about you guys all the time, as do my parents. So thank you for reading!

Monday, May 11, 2009

The conversation I just had with my mom about my birthday

Me: Can you believe I've been alive for this long?

My mom: Can you believe I've been a mother for this long?

Me: I can't believe any of this has been going on for this long.

Saturday, May 09, 2009

What I've been up to

What have I been doing since we last talked? Allow me to regale you with a list because I've been doing so much that the English language is barely sufficient to capture it all and I may have to snargle blarg snarf gleen!

1. Going to Balboa Island with my mom and Tobey and meeting all sorts of kids because Tobey is popular with children in a way that I never was, even when I was a child.

2. Looking these kids in they eye and saying things like, "I don't want to freak you out but let me ask you a question, if I were your age do you think you would have liked me? Why or why not?"

3. Rolling my eyes and saying to the parents, "Looks like you're raising a real winner there."

4. Getting my hair straightened not with actual chocolate but with chocolate scented carcinogens.

5. Hush my mouth I shouldn't even joke about that!

6. Bite my tongue I shouldn't even hush my mouth about that!

7. Hold the phone I shouldn't be biting my hushed mouth about that!

8. Pump the brakes who's on the phone right now?

9. Keep your pants on and answer the car phone!

10. I wrote bants my mistake. Bants is funny. Nice bants!

11. You came in here like a bant out of hell.

12. By that I mean you were like a little pair of pants that hang upside down and flap around.

13. Oh also a friend and I invented a small squirrel named Mr. Pickles who craps in his diaper when he's angry. It's a special cinco de mayo diaper. I can't really take credit for it, I just went along with it as I was too busy ducking the bants.

14. I went to a bday party for a 9 year old and saw a whole bunch of friends and then gave birth to my own 9 year old and also played Ms. Pacman.

15. Rubbed the side of my nostril at dinner because I had that uncomfortable pre-zit feeling and then my friend Trevor who I referred to in the last post and who wasn't only my prom date but is one of my best friends grabbed my hand and said, "stop." But was he saying that because he thought I was actually sitting at the table picking my nose? Because I wasn't. This was a strictly superficial nostril massage, the kind that screams "appropriate for fine dining."

16. Not that I really want to go into the intricacies of zits here but have you noticed how some seem to take forever to do their thing but then others are speedy? I felt an oncoming zit that night and by this morning it's already sent me a card thanking me for allowing it to spend the night on my face. That's better than some guys!

17. That was a terrible joke, I'm sorry.

18. Yeah so at dinner the seafood tower arrived and unfortunately it was just some stuff on ice which ruled out playing Jenga with it, which I kind of wanted to do. The crab came in a little terrine of dry ice so naturally my dad leaned forward and inhaled some dry ice and then blew it back out in a way designed to get as much attention as possible. The part where he motioned to the waiter and then did it and then smiled? Apparently the waiter was entertained, as were the entire table of people next to us however I turned right back into a high schooler and said "DAD!" and then tried to make my body as small as possible and hide behind the table cloth. The adult part of me said, "Wait, can you blow dry ice rings?" (Answer? No, only dry ice puffs.) I didn't ask about dry ice French inhaling because I didn't want my dad to hurt himself.

19. Not that I'm beyond reproach. I totally turned into an asshole and got all picky about which table we sat at.

20. I pretty much only turn into an asshole around my parents and around my birthday.

21. I wrote some jokes.

22. Oh, so I've been bad about scanning and uploading all of this but I've been doing the celeb slip ups in Life & Style every week so if you're near a Life & Style, grab that shit.

23. What else have I been doing?

24. Um... I went to the tide pools and walked around with my friend and her daughter and then we went to her house and I almost played Uno but I didn't. They had an automatic card shuffler. Remember when I was trying to teach myself fancy card shuffling?

25. I gained 35 pounds give or take 35 pounds.

26. I slept under a keyboard.

27. I went shopping even though I hate shopping.

28. Ok so it wasn't exactly sleeping under a keyboard but sleeping near a keyboard and then waking up almost under it.

29. Thought about how I haven't twittered enough while also trying to explain twitter to people here which is never a very satisfactory conversation to have.

30. Went to a crazy Cinco de Mayo party on Cinco de Mayo.

31. Swallowed wrong and coughed a lot. That just happened and now my throat feels irritated and my eyes are wet and my paws are cold and I'm not holding my tail up. Also my coat isn't glistening. I hope it's not parvo.

32. Or kennel cough. I definitely don't want kennel cough.

Friday, May 08, 2009

chocolate and nostalgia

Hey you guys. I'm so remiss in posting and my head is swirling and my hair smells like chocolate. That's not figurative. It literally smells like chocolate because I got it straightened with actual chocolate. They just squirted chocolate syrup all over my head and then smushed it around. It's all the rage in Brazil apparently. The thing is that I asked them to leave the nuts off and then next thing I know everyone's putting their nuts on my head. And I could do without all these flies, you know?

So I'm starting to get the OC confusion I get when I'm here too long and I start attaching willy nilly like some kind of suction cup that only sticks to things on the West Coast that once were a part of my life. Does that make any sense? I could probably explain better but I'm late to go to dinner with my parents and the guy I went to prom with. See what I'm saying? 

See, for the first couple days I was here I had a head full of New York and was like, What kind of vacation is this if my head hasn't given up all this junk?" And now New York feels so far away it kind of scares me. But then I've been here before and usually once I'm on the plane I'm plunged back into my old life which is my new life but you know what I mean. Unless you don't. Also, I'm not loving "plunged" but couldn't think of a better word.

And do I have a puppy yet? No. 

Anyway, just wanted to say a quick hello. I'll be back to regular blogging and perhaps even being funny very soon, I promise. I miss all of you!

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Write up about Wednesday's show

Here's a little write up of the show I'm going to be performing at on Wednesday. Little do they know I'm going to dab vinegar and water behind my ears!

Monday, May 04, 2009

Things I'm not doing right now

I'm currently experiencing a dearth of pith which is a shame really, as I need to turn in some pithy one liners by tomorrow morning. If only I needed to turn in papers on a desk or board games, both of which I can see a lot of from my seat at my mom's computer.  I could go on about things I see but that would just be procrastinating and I'm if I'm going to procrastinate I'd rather do something I feel passionate about, like saving the kangaroos or having tantric sex. Or having tantric sex with kangaroos who I've saved.

Go ahead and judge all you want, but have you tried it? Once you get past the feeling of, "hey, I'm having sex with a kangaroo and it's lasting a really long time and is that weird," it's fairly mind blowing.

Oh, these bruises? No, not from that. They're from being clumsy and thin-skinned and apparently not knowing where I end and other people and things begin. You think I'm joking but I've nearly taken out two people and an end cap at a grocery store on this trip. Everything in California is just closer to me, literally, than in New York. It's as if I'm on rollerblades and suck at rollerblading only instead I'm on foot and suck at walking/standing.

Did I mention I need to write something remotely clever but I'm not feeling clever? I think I did.

I could text a friend, not to get clever ideas but to pass time, but I refer to my above statements about kangaroo sex and passion. If I'm going to dilly dally I should really be doing something I prefer. Like watching Gossip Girl. My parents are recording it for me though.

Or instead of texting a friend I could call another friend who I'm overdue in contacting. I should really do that. Or text the other friend. Or call another other friend. As a friend, I kind of suck right now. As a person who writes clever things I also am kind of sucking right now. As someone who is sitting near an adorable dog, I'm kicking ass.

Ok, it's time to attempt the cleverness again. Then it's kangaroos.