the ocean

Happy Birthday, America!

The Fourth of July is almost upon us, and I thought it would be a good time to share some modest suggestions for how to observe this most special of days:

– Rethinking decision to go with wooden dentures in honor of our founding fathers.

– Declaring independence from high prices at Dollar General Stores.

– Announcing that you’d like to show Betsy Ross some stars and stripes, if you know what I mean.

– Calling England to see if it might still want to get back together; getting nervous and hanging up when it answers the phone.

– Rehearsing cover of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” with cousin’s death metal band.

– Dumping tea in harbor; realizing you forgot to pick up the lemons.

– Trying to bring back “the three-cornered hat look.”

– Amending Constitution so that it applies only to you.

– Reenacting the Battle of Bunker Hill with your Care Bears; sobbing openly when Funshine Bear is bayoneted.

– Calling fireworks display “trite” and “overdone.”

– Reporting unpatriotic neighbors and friends to John Ashcroft.

– Exercising constitutional right to call your cousin Mabel stupid.

– Driving by and tossing firecrackers at that punk kid down the block who rides that moped around at all hours of the night.

Junior Achiever

So my sister was in town this past weekend (imagine a female version of me, except more popular with my parents and more visually similar to our childhood mailman), and good lord do we know how to piss time away. I don’t want to blame the Nintendo, but it certainly couldn’t have helped that we played approximately 12,000 games of Bad News Baseball, the Japanese translation of our nation’s pastime that features rabbit umpires, a shortstop on the first base side, and completely random scoring. I also defended my Dr. Mario championship, which I’ve sadly found carries very little weight with your finer medical schools. But we’re friends of all media, so we also made sure to rehearse a touching reenactment of the Degrassi Junior High: The Next Generation where Terri’s abusive boyfriend puts her into a coma (I got the plum role of the abusive boyfriend, thanks to my mastery of “crazy eyes”) and create a helpful chart of Lindsay Lohan’s overexposure based on old copies of Us Weekly (seven separate appearances in the June 28 issue alone). See, who says kids these days don’t care about science? Oh wait, that was me, when we got to thermodynamics in Mr. Baird’s physics class...

But anyway, I am once again a productive member of society, and therefore filled with secret loathing. Yesterday I attended a one hour meeting about how to make work product (but apparently not meetings) shorter and more efficient. Then I worked efficiently well into the evening revising drafts I wrote last week that have been returned with neat little comments like “it’s just kind of blah” and “why do I care about this?” Suffice it to say that my victory in the Bad News World Series may stay my biggest accomplishment of the week.

The Social Event of the Season

I hate to steal the thunder of Chicago’s fine society reporters and gossip columnists (they’ll have to go back to picking at the political corpse of “avant garde” clubbing enthusiast Jack Ryan and obsessing minutely over the whereabouts of the various Cusacks), but I feel I have a moral and ethical duty to report the scintillating details of Saturday night’s highly exclusive roof party at the J-spot. The Boone’s Farm Wine Product and Fla-Vor-Ice ran freely, my friends, and the conversation hit every imaginable high note, from a frank examination of the subtle mind-control tactics employed by Hillary Duff to a fascinating dissection of where the girl from my undergrad who always wore brand-new-looking ‘80s clothes (including white denim and Keds styled with baseball-type stitching) might ever have acquired them. It was a veritable Algonquin Round Table, although I’m pretty sure Dorothy Parker never gave away door prizes. Which means those poor fools never even had a chance of winning Jumbo Calypso Braids and self-help books on tape entitled Hug the Monster. History is filled with sadness.

Of course, I’ve reached a point where the many irritations of coordinating such a festive occasion almost outweigh the benefits. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why people for whom I provide hundreds of dollars of free food and alcohol feel free to randomly ransack my cabinets and, yes, even dresser drawers, in search of whatever long-sleeve pullover or Little Debbie Snack Cake happens to strike their whim. Clearly, short of burying my belongings in the yard there is no way to be safe from these marauders. I also, frankly, don’t see the humor in the many creative attempts of my party guests to create ashtrays and urinals where in fact none exist. I support art as much as the next person, but peeing in a bottle on my back porch is frankly too avant garde. And for me, nothing beats the morning-after cleanup, when my kitchen and bathroom floors have apparently been replaced with the stickum-encrusted floors from a movie theater, possibly pornographic, last cleaned in the mid 1970s. It’s not easy being the center of the social universe.

Community Beat

– Mary-Kate Olsen. I can’t help but feel that John Stamos is behind this somehow. On the plus side, at least now she won’t have to worry about people knowing the difference between her and her sister.

– DSL. So what if everyone I meet online turns out to be an undercover cop? I don’t know how I lived without it. There’s something about repeatedly downloading crappy trailers for movies you don’t plan to see that is uniquely satisfying.

– Ice Cream Trucks. There’s one in my neighborhood that I seriously think must be a front for a drug operation. It only comes around late at night, and its jingle is an extended Phish cover. Plus, is Fucked Up Fudge a legitimate flavor?

– Arrested Development. Please watch this show. It’s hilarious, and besides, it provides at least half an hour each week where FOX cannot put Paris Hilton on the air.

– The Fake Farm in Lincoln Park. There’s something vaguely sad about this. People in rural America aren’t constructing models of urine soaked sidewalks and disgruntled cab drivers to teach their children about city life. You want a real farm experience, I’ll send you to meet my Wisconsin cousins. Just don’t expect to keep all of your toes.

– The Clinton Book. I hear he took some literary license. For instance, Hillary has wings, and Al Gore is a magic leprechaun.

I've got the day off tomorrow, so I won't be posting; bitterly weep at my absence and eagerly await Monday's edition.

Celebrity Corner

When you run an incredibly important media outlet like this one—the Internet’s #1 source for obscure literary references and anecdotes that make you wonder if the author has a serious drinking problem—it’s a constant struggle not to sell out to the Hollywood machine. You’ve always got Harvey Weinstein or Madonna on the line (you have to listen for the fake British accent to know which one) asking you to review this movie or surgically alter that starlet or execute this Latin American dictator. And so you take a sexual favor here and a 21 Grams tote bag there until one day you find yourself sitting at your keyboard, singing the praises of Garfield: The Movie for 20th Century FOX in exchange for $50 and five minutes of free slapping time with Jennifer Love Hewitt, and you think “Oh God, what have I become? And did I really call Breckin Meyer ‘a Cary Grant for the new millennium?’ He was on Inside Schwartz, for God’s sake! Oh, the humanity!”

All of which is beside the point. My actual news, and it is big, is that thanks to my massive importance within the entertainment community, I have landed an exclusive interview with one Jennifer Lopez. Yes, that’s right, apparently fearing that she might remain out of the news for more than five minutes and realizing that the law still limits her to only one husband at a time, the new Mrs. Anthony turned to me for help. Well, actually she turned to InTouch Weekly, but sometimes I steal their mail. And then it turned out that I was busy realphabetizing my CD collection at the time she wanted to conduct the interview, so I sent my 93-year-old grandmother instead. She’s pretty down with the kids, though, don’t worry. Anyway, what follows are the thrilling results:


NINETY-THREE YEAR OLD GRANDMOTHER: So you’re on the TV or something?
JENNIFER LOPEZ-ANTHONY: Well, I have been on TV. But right now I’m focusing on my music and film careers. And, of course, on my marriage.
N-TYOG: What? You’re gonna have to speak up, honey, my batteries are due for a change here.
JL-A: I was just saying...
N-TYOG: Actually, why don’t you give me a hand here?
(twenty minutes later)
N-TYOG: There. Damn thing never did work right. I tell you, I’ve written that crooked ear doctor so many letters in my head.
JL-A: Yes, well, my husband Marc and I like to write each other long passionate letters whenever we’re apart. It helps us to...
N-TYOG: You one of them Latinos?
JL-A: Excuse me?
N-TYOG: Latinos. Like that Natalie Wood in West Side Story? Now that was a movie.
JL-A: Well, my parents came to New York from Puerto Rico, so...
N-TYOG: I tell you, I can’t even stand these movies any more, with all that sex and shooting and everything. I can’t even turn on the TV any more without seeing some woman running around with her brazziere showing. In the middle of my stories! What if a child saw that?
JL-A: Well, my next movie, Shall We Dance? with Richard Gere, should be something the whole family can enjoy. In it I play a dance instructor who...
N-TYOG: Oh, we used to know how to do some dancing, I’ll tell you that. Every Friday night Chub and Dot and I used to go down to the Knights of Columbus hall, they had this orchestra in, they’d play Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. And we’d all get Cokes—this was back when they used to cost just a nickel. And Chub would come up to me, and he’d say “you don’t want to be a wallflower, do you?” And we’d do the fox trot, and the cha cha, and the waltz. And now all you hear is that noise, that shouting—that ain’t music, I’ll tell you that.
JL-A: Oh, those olds songs are great, aren’t they? That’s why I always...
N-TYOG: Tell ya what. I’d love to hear it, but had to take my water pill this morning, need it for my heart, well that’s what that idiot doctor says, anyways, I’ve got to use the washroom, so I don’t know, do you want some cookies or anything before you go? I brought cookies. And a ham. I baked a ham.
JL-A: Uh, I’m not really that hungry, so...
N-TYOG: And there’s some mashed potatoes in those tupperware containers. Which I will want back, by the way. All right, Lord help me, I’m a comin’...

The Longest Day

Yesterday, June 21, was the longest day of the year, at least for countries in the Northern Hemisphere. (Apologies to all my readers in Madagascar and Micronesia, who still have six months to go.) This day has always had a special significance for me, at first for no other reason than that it was the day on which I got the most time to run around in the yard pretending I was a superspy and throwing rocks at my sister. (Small rocks; no permanent damage was done.) As I’ve gotten older, however, June 21 has become less about projectiles and more about maximizing experience, about taking a moment to recognize the joys of living life before I run out of quarters and most likely just miss that great list of high scores in the sky.

There’s a passage from The Great Gatsby I’ve always loved that incorporates June 21. Daisy comments that every year she looks forward to the longest day of the year but somehow fails to notice it when it arrives. Of course, it’s a wonderfully real little character detail, since Daisy is full of whims she never quite follows through on, but to me it’s also sort of the story of all of us, passionately longing for things in the abstract (love, happiness, respect) but somehow losing them in the details when they’re right before us. There are so many distractions in the world that even our most primal desires can get buried under a heap of Tatu albums and infomercials for spray-on hair. And the desire for light, which, after all, does give life to every single thing on this planet, is probably the most basic of them all. That’s why people become assholes in winter—they don’t like coming home from work in the dark any more than you do.

So anyway, I now try to memorialize June 21 in some way every year, in hopes that my recognition of one important life force will lead to greater awareness of all the elements that make up that profound absurdity we call existence. Last night it was as simple as a glass of wine on my roof at sunset, coupled with the thought that, yes, from this point on there aren’t quite as many minutes in the day or as many days in a lifetime. And then I chucked a couple of rocks at passersby, just for good measure.

Professional Development

I wish there were some way I could make weekends my job. I mean, let’s face it, my skills are completely underutilized at my actual job, where Saved by the Bell references go unnoticed and no one seems to care how many jagerbombs I can drink. There’s just this whole negative work culture that’s all so focused on, you know, completing things and being competent. But weekends are where I really shine, as I lie in the sun and pick up dry cleaning with the very best in the business.

This weekend, for instance, I went to the Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright concert at Ravinia. Of course the concert itself was beyond amazing, and it ended up being a beautiful night to be outside. But I really made the event my own by downing a week-and-a-half-old bag of CVS-brand cotton candy on the train on the way up and becoming so hyper that I was basically speaking in tongues, and not just to people who cared to listen. I followed that up with a good deal of wine, and then on the return trip I decided I should drink an entire two-liter of Diet Coke directly from the bottle. After that, things get a little hazy, but I’m pretty sure there was an extended Woody Allen impression involved. See, I’m both fun and timely.

After a rather rocky Saturday morning, then, which involved the well-established rehabilitative powers of the increasingly-tiny McDonald’s Bacon, Egg, and Cheese biscuit, my friend and I made a trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo. In a matter of hours we saw wildlife from every corner of the planet, including a meerkat who had recently delivered eighteen babies and looked quite frankly suicidal and a chimpanzee who was visibly enjoying the shocked expressions of the parents and children to whom he repeatedly displayed his genitalia. It was good people watching, too, from the woman in pink culottes who was simultaneously drinking from a rhinoceros-shaped sippy cup and ferociously ignoring her children’s apparent attempts to throw themselves into the bear pit to the fanny-pack-sporting gentleman screaming customized messages of Jesus’ love (Hey, girl with the red hair--Jesus loves people with red hair! He loves skateboarders, too!) outside the front entrance. It did make me wonder, however, if perhaps the wrong creatures had been put in cages.

So yeah, it was a good weekend. The kind of weekend, really, that would legitimately merit an annual salary upwards of a hundred grand. If only I could get those bigwigs in upper management to think outside the box!

From the Archives

Although many people erroneously believe that the Internet, like Vanilla Ice and the Simpsons t-shirt craze, was a creation of the ‘90s, this weblog has actually been continually updated by yours truly for well nigh three millennia. Because one of those ivory tower eggheads in management at some point decided our archives should be stored solely on Betamax, however, “classic” episodes of my sound and fury can be hard to come by. To ease that pain, I offer the following excerpts:

October 7, 1983. Is it just me, or is kindergarten kind of unsanitary? If we’re not slathering things with paint we’re making science projects we can eat, and I swear to God I saw a kid sucking his thumb yesterday. And Kristen Nelson just goes around kissing everybody all the time—she’s going to make some therapist very wealthy some day. Anyway, I’m off to story time. Has anyone else noticed that Goodnight Moon has no plot?

June 22, 1989. Oh my God, I has such a crazy weekend! My friends and I drank a six pack of Jolt cola and saw Batman. I’m not sure if it was the lack of FDA approval or Kim Basinger’s Apple-II-sized glasses, but I felt a little weird and tingly. Then we played The Legend of Zelda and talked about some kids we kind of know who may have seen a porno. I’m so glad Nick’s parents are getting divorced; now they just yell at each other and pretty much let us do whatever we want.

February 6, 1992. Okay, so they’ve got to amp up either the timeliness or the production values of sex ed. Melissa Thompson already has a baby; I don’t think she’s really going to be blown away by the former star of Broadway’s Annie telling her her body’s going to go through some “kind of funny changes.” Let’s see some skin, people! And it doesn’t help that my teacher reminds me of Jerry Orbach...

November 13, 1995. I love Hootie & the Blowfish so much! Seriously, get their album, they’re going to be around for a really long time.

September 25, 1997. If my roommate doesn’t put some pants on soon there’s going to be some serious trouble. I mean, really, who irons naked? Isn’t that a health hazard? And while we’re at it, he could stop taking those half-hour showers. I don’t know what he does in there, and don’t necessarily care to inquire, although I do hear an inordinate amount of talking and/or singing going on. I guess I can’t complain too much, though; my friend’s roommate got really drunk and decided their closet was the bathroom. My roommate may obsessively eat mint chocolate chip ice cream every Tuesday night at 10:36 PM, but at least I haven’t had to have the carpets cleaned.

April 10, 2003. Law school and prison are much more similar than you would think. Both are horrible, dark, foul-smelling places of confinement, and both leave you in constant fear of being shanked. I can’t wait to get out of here. I know working is going to be completely awesome!

Disclaimer

It has occurred to me recently that this blog sort of—okay, completely—makes me sound like a psychopath. I mean, it seems like every other entry is about how I can’t deal with some social situation or have an irrational loathing of some person/thing or want to go through some celebrity’s trash or something. In contrast, there are very few entries about me uneventfully earning an honest day’s wage, loving God and America, and watching Everybody Loves Raymond. I just don’t come across as typical—more like Larry David with marginally better hair but without the Seinfeld money. Trust me, the resemblance is uncanny.

So to set the record straight, I just want to point out that I do not literally suffer from any sort of personality or mood disorders, and that my only compulsions are grammatical in nature. (I don’t like to end sentences with prepositions and I have an urge to smack people when they say “less” where “fewer” is appropriate.) I had a perfectly happy, normal, non-Charlize-Theron childhood, marred only by the realization that Ronald McDonald was not a legitimate profession. I have no arrests or convictions, although I was once told that I was banned from the Orange Julius for life. So sadly, for me the insanity is just rhetoric. Make of it what you will.

Work Can be Fun!!!!!!

Doing nothing is great, but let’s face it: unless your job title is “DMV employee” or “Paris Hilton,” you can’t get away with it on a regular basis. So you’re going to have to learn how to get the most out of life while wasting it on mind-numbing employment. To that end, I’ve compiled a list of amazing and delightful office pastimes:

– Handcrafting whimsical dolls out of paper clips, erasers, and post-it notes; pretending those dolls are the loved ones you never see.

– Studying coworkers’ behavior patterns for inclusion in your upcoming treatise on dementia and psychopathy.

– Expanding definition of “business casual” attire to include crop tops and Hammer pants.

– Customizing your cnn.com account to send you automatic updates on any Urkel-related news; waiting several thousand years.

– Thinking of tactful ways to explain to your boss that muttonchops are never coming back in style.

– Organizing automatic stapler races.

– Asking incoming job applicants to select an appliance they believe they would most like to be; announcing that their responses are “stupid” and “seriously deranged.”

– Loudly relating sexually explicit stories from your personal life to no one in particular in crowded elevators.

– Fitting the phrase “dead inside” into office small talk.

– Convincing yourself that they give out Pulitzer Prizes for memos; holding a brief award ceremony during which you forget to thank your mother.

– Contemplating how the details of the weekly staff meeting can be incorporated into the action comedy screenplay you’re planning to send to Vin Diesel.

– Answering the phone in different comical voices; analyzing how your own view of comedy differs from that of your boss.

– Concocting elaborate revenge fantasies involving fire ants and maple syrup.

Happy workdays!

Facets

– IKEA. Seriously, can’t we think up some reason to bomb Sweden? Those ridiculous instructional drawings with the neuter guy slapping bookshelves with a mallet and calling the help line ought to be enough. I hear ole neuter’s been talking some trash about the Patriot Act, too, if that helps.

– The MTV Movie Awards. You know it’s bad when you find yourself missing the subtle comic touches of Seann William Scott. The introductions sounded like they’d been written by a sugar-withdrawn Bruce Vilanch, translated into Sanskrit by a Commodore 64, and then translated back by Keanu Reeves. Sad.

– Henry James. It turns out he’s kind of fun when it’s not 1:30 the night before your paper is due. Although he still does kind of go on a bit.

– Tom Selleck. There’s a guy at my gym who seriously looks like him, full-bodied ‘stache and all. I think I might have to drop some pro-gun-control propaganda near the stairmaster some time to further investigate this important issue.

– Henry James & Tom Selleck. Can the rumors of a collaboration be true? Imagine, Three Men and a Portrait of a Little Lady coming to a theater near you next summer.

– The Reagan Funeral. Do you feel like it was maybe overkill to have around-the-clock coverage on every network? Because when you start messing with my Oprah, that’s serious business. And I hear FOX News is pitching a Reagan Funeral reality series for fall.

What a Difference Four Days Make

Working a nine-to-five job undeniably has its advantages (an amazing range of highlighter color options and unfettered access to copiers come to mind), but flexibility is not one of them. Employment, I have sadly discovered, generally requires a person to remain in a designated location for some eight hours a day, and that location is seldom a video arcade or ice cream parlor. In fact, unless you work in a grade school or a prison, your labor is pretty much expected to be uninterrupted, without the benefit of breaks to play foursquare or shank your cellmate. So although the delights of my four-day weekend were many, the realization that there was nothing, in fact, that I was required to do was chief among them. I largely filled my time with necessary but oft-neglected tasks like arguing with the cable company, cleaning the toothpaste specks off the bathroom mirror, and watching VH1's Best Week Ever.

Of course, it wasn’t all just assorted housewifery. Thanks to weather that actually approximated what it’s like to dwell in a climate that supports life, I got out to the Old Town Art Fair and some of my friends’ art fair parties. Although I couldn’t help but notice that the Fair has become more and more about hot pretzels, beer, and yuppies with puppies than about, er, art, and I had to leave my credit card at home to avoid amassing third-world-country-level debt solely through the purchase of unbelievably well-composed natural light landscape photographs, I had a great time. The four semesters of art history instruction felt somehow less than completely useless, and one of my friends talked to one of the artists for so long that the artist gave him a free photograph, along with an understanding of what it means to experience true social awkwardness. So what if I sunburned my feet and caught a fairgoer peeing against the side of my apartment building? I landed me some kulture, with a kapital “k.”

But the lamest joy I experienced all weekend had to be last night, when I walked down to the park around sunset and just enjoyed the feeling of wandering around on a beautiful night with no obligations except the possibility of catching a rerun of Arrested Development at 8:30. I slipped off my flip-flops and felt, for the first time in months, the soft green grass against the soles of my feet, only briefly considering the probability of contracting tetanus. I looked out at the lake, whimsically sparkling all pink and blue in the waning light, and thought, yes, this is where I’m supposed to be right now, and this is what humans are supposed to do—experience life with all the complicated levels of feeling and intellect the higher power gave us. And that I did. And then I went home and packed up my PBJ for another exciting work week.

Agenda

As you may or may not be aware, I have the next few days off from work. To make the most of this increasingly less rare blessing, I have composed a detailed “task list” of “action items” to “actualize” during my break. Who says that business minor was a waste of time? Actually, maybe that was me. Anyway, here’s what I’ll be up to:

– Starting my own line of homemade jams and jellies.
– Constructing shoebox dioramas of key moments in the Reagan administration.
– Driving around in a van and solving mysteries.
– Memorizing the Gettysburg address, because you never know when a thing like that will come in handy.
– Isolating the gene that causes people to buy humvees; telling that gene it has way too much money.
– Stalking Angela Lansbury.
– Completing coursework for masters degree in French.
– Performing unsolicited baptisms.
– Ghostwriting Ryan Seacrest’s autobiography; struggling to come up with euphemisms for “sucks.”
– Destroying evidence.
– Analyzing how my neighborhood’s “weekday gunshots” differ in quality and type from those on the weekends.
– Refusing to comment on rumors I’ve married Jennifer Lopez.
– Inventing time machine; using it to prevent the cancellation of Blossom.
– Thinking about how the phrase “the cancellation of Blossom” sounds dirty.
– Writing the songs that make the whole world sing.

I’ll be back on Monday, probably exhausted from all of this exertion. Peace.

Noteworthy

– Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azbakan. Better, but still surprisingly like a book on tape for a man whose last movie featured a teenaged Mexican threesome. Why not kick it up a notch and let Oliver Stone direct the next one?

– Caffeine. According to my limited-English-speaking hairstylist, it’s supposed to be good for you now. And what better source could there be to consult? I do wish she wouldn’t get withdrawal shakes while she’s holding the scissors, though.

– Lockjaw. Do people still get this? Because if I remember my 8th grade health class correctly, I feel like I might have it. Of course, I also thought I had pleurisy, but even Rex Morgan, M.D., makes a mistake every now and then.

– The Tony Awards. Broadway’s one shot each year to scare the crap out of Middle America. If the cursing puppets don’t get Earl and Eunice from Iowa out to Times Square, I don’t know what will.

– Sushi. Despite all assurances to the contrary, I continue to not like it. Although I do enjoy wielding chopsticks and pretending I speak Japanese.

– Jennifer Lopez. Why isn’t anyone proposing a constitutional amendment to keep her from getting married? Or from living at all, frankly?

– Online Shopping. It’s frighteningly easy to lose all control and just start ordering Maya Angelou shot glasses on E-Bay. I tried to give them my credit card number at cnn.com the other day, just as a reflex.

Monday, Monday

I can’t really claim to have the most glamorous or exciting lifestyle. A lot of times my weekends are spent sleeping, lying on the couch watching The Game on TNT for like the thousandth time, or meticulously vacuuming the potato chip crumbs out of my living room rugs. I have been known to play board games with my friends (What can I say? I happen to have a savant-like gift for Taboo.) and I recently watched a tape I didn’t know I’d made of the 2000 Olympics nearly all the way through (Go men’s synchronized diving team!). Somehow, though, despite my weekend inaction I generally manage to arrive sufficiently exhausted at my office each Monday to make my employer think I spent the weekend at Studio 54 snorting coke off Liza Minelli’s ass. I’m not really sure what my problem is.

In general, that is. This particular weekend my fatigue probably has something to do with the 12-hour barbeque extravaganza my roommate decided we should hold. Drinking and sitting in the heat for hours are always a winning combination, and adding brisket and week-old macaroni salad into the mix was, quite frankly, a brilliant innovation. By midnight I was drinking bad white zinfandel out of a plastic cup and desperately searching for the E.L. Fudges. Basically, we were only a six-pack of Zima and a couple of Hilton sisters away from the classiest evening of the summer.

So another work week starts with a state of exhaustion generally reserved for returns clerks at IKEA and your mom after Fleet Week. It’s just as well, really. Why let work make you feel like hell when you’re clearly capable of doing that yourself?

Death is so not Fun or Cool

I’ve recently developed a little habit (in fact, let’s take a cue from the mini-donut people and call it a “habette”) of flipping on the morning news while I complete the various near-compulsive rituals that help me prepare for my day. Typically, this just means that I flip back and forth comparing the inane small talk capabilities of the major network anchors and trying to spot the tiny staples that keep Katie Couric’s forehead from slipping right off her face while I eat my Fruity Pebbles, get dressed, repeatedly wash my hands, etc. But today I heard a story that really caught my attention, and no, it wasn’t the heartwarming one right before they sign off about the one-legged squirrel that knows how to drive a tractor.

Apparently, some guy in the suburbs went off his medication and just started stabbing people in a Walgreens, eventually killing a one-year-old and injuring a whole slew of other people. It’s sad, sure, but no sadder than yesterday’s killing or the one the day before. (In Chicago it’s basically just a daily segment on the news – weather, sports, murder. I also want to point out that this is the second per-capita murder capital I have lived in, Decatur, IL, being the first, although both cities have experienced mysterious declines in their murder rates after my arrival.) But what really struck me was the randomness of the whole thing. Just imagine – you spend your whole life eschewing french fries and burritos in favor of heart healthy oat bran, wearing huge idiotic-looking hats to avoid that nasty cancer-causing sun, never missing a chance to wear a seat belt or a condom, basically doing everything you’re “supposed to do” and wham, one day you’re pricing nasal decongestants in aisle seven and you get cut up by some nutjob who decided he didn’t need his mood stabilizers any more. Damn. The world isn’t fair, I know, but can’t it at least be a little more predictable? Why can’t we assign life spans according to merit? No one would miss Sharon Stone.

This isn’t a whole “live every day to the fullest” thing for me; my life is pretty full, thank you, and I’ve seen way too many people go out to seize the day and just end up grabbing substance abuse problems and herpes. Nor am I espousing the precariousness of existence; I’m pretty sure the number of people NOT randomly targeted by lunatics still exceeds the number shot in Sbarros. Frankly, I’m not sure what it is. Maybe I’m just appreciating life, and how much it beats the alternative. Maybe I just need some mood stabilizers. I can tell you for damn sure, though, that the next time I head in for some cough drops I’ll definitely be watching my back.

I am a Nifty, Multidimensional Person

Last night, a friend told me that when she first met me, she thought I was “one of those guys who is only interested in one thing.” Once I realized that she wasn’t referring to the Real World/Road Rules Challenge, I was sort of offended. Of course, I’m kind of slow, so by the time I managed to work up some righteous indignation, everyone had gone home and I was stuck defending myself to my autographed picture of Sylvester Stallone’s mother. But I made up a list of things that I am interested in, and guess what? S-E-X didn’t even make the top 25:

– Cool old buildings with like gargoyles and shit and cool new buildings with lots of shiny metal and glass.
– Small towns with little locally-owned restaurants where the waitresses have all worked for thirty years.
– History, especially the really sexy stuff like ancient Egypt and the Renaissance.
– Boggle and how I am really awesome at it.
– Vintage clothing that I can’t believe they ever made in the first place and yet somehow still really want to buy.
– Cubs baseball and its attendant sadness.
– Creatures that live really really far underwater or in the middle of the rainforest and have like weird multiple eyes and stuff.
– People who have tragic histories but positive attitudes.
– Linguistics, especially first language acquisition.
– Religion and its relationship to faith
– Traditions and how they got to be that way.
– Art, especially the really-whacked-out contemporary stuff that makes people angry, although I have no special love for the Piss Christ.
– Pretty green plants and how I can aspire to no longer kill them.
– Modernist poetry.
– What celebrities are like in real life, or if they even actually have real lives. I mean, somehow I can’t imagine Katie Couric just heading down the block to the dry cleaner’s, can you?
– Poor people and why everyone seems to hate them. And what I can do to help them. And if they really do just go buy booze with the money I give them. And if they’re willing to share.
– H.R. Puffnstuff reruns and how fucked up they are.
– The things that people do for a living. Like making sure short people don’t get on the Batman ride at Six Flags? That’s someone’s job.
– Education, specifically how to teach everyone to be as wonderful as I am without seeming overbearing about it.
– Genealogy and the desire, as one ages, to be more connected with one’s past.
– What happens to people after they go on those extreme makeover shows. Don’t you feel like maybe they’d sometimes miss their old noses?
– Books. The way they smell, feel, look, and, oh yeah, what’s in them.
– Psychology, especially the abnormal kind.
– Ghosts, because they’re definitely real, and ghost stories, just because they’re awesome.
– Lists and why they are so much fun.

So consider that assessment of my character rebutted. By this point, perhaps you’ve forgotten what that assessment was, or have even clicked back over to porn, but I’m not going to remind you. Just take it from me that I’m a (basically) good person.

Labor Relations

My office has instituted a “summer flex time” program, and it turns out that doesn’t mean we’re all weight training to slim down for swimsuit season. Instead, we’re being offered one extra day off every two weeks in exchange for additional back-breaking office labor (it’s like a coal mine, but without the blacklung) on the nine days we’re there. Apparently, the theory is that although allowing employees to enjoy their lives would cause the national economy to crumble any time between September and May, summer temperatures themselves exert some magic upward force on the GDP. Now I’m no John Maynard Keynes, but I declare this plan macroecotastic!

Of course, the likely result of all of this is that I will completely waste one extra day every two weeks, unless sleeping in the sun and watching Days of Our Lives now have some form of social utility. I mean, it’s not like I spend weekends learning Portuguese and developing clean-burning substitutes for fossil fuels as it is. The most logical thing would be to travel on my long weekends, but let’s face it, even The Dells (America’s Favorite Waterpark Upstairs) lose their luster after a while. Maybe I should join the Rotary Club or something. Are they the ones with those hats? Because I’m not much for doing stuff, but I really like hats.

This and That

– The World War II Memorial. Either they dedicated this six or seven times this weekend, or C-SPAN desperately needs to get some new content. I suggest a comedy about six attractive New York singles who meet in a coffee shop to talk about their sex lives and pass legislation.

– The Day After Tomorrow. I’d say the Earth entering a whole new Ice Age is pretty much worthwhile if it helps Jake Gyllenhaal become closer to his emotionally distant father.

– Tight Security. There’s a guard at my building who I have never seen do anything but play solitaire and sing to himself. But if I have scissors in my bag, suddenly it’s Code Red.

– Lindsay Lohan. Boob job or not, she’s definitely orange. Bottom line? She should stop taking image tips from Muppets.

– Driving Excellence. Look, just because I almost run you over while using both hands to search for the Spree I may or may not have dropped under the front seat, that doesn’t give you the right to glare at me. Let me actually kill you first, then we’ll talk.

– Wal-Mart. How can they not want to let them build one in Chicago? Where else can you have your automotive and fashion needs met in a single trip?