the ocean

Apologies in Advance

I'm afraid I'm going to have to talk about Star Jones for a little while.

First of all, she is hilarious. Not intentionally, of course, but just by living her wig-encrusted, gay-husband-adorned life. She has lost about ten million pounds and looks like she has come to us from another planet, and not necessarily in peace. She does celebrity red carpet "interviews" where she calls exceedingly famous people by the wrong names and often refuses to let them get a word in edgewise. She had a wedding that looked more like a My Super Sweet Sixteen. And she's a lawyer, although she lost the case of people v. good taste and decency a long time ago. So much fun.

And now she has the best celebrity exit since Tonya Harding cried her way off the ice through the lingering strains of the Jurassic Park soundtrack with an unfastened skate. I mean, seriously, how bad do you have to be to piss off Barbara Walters? She would do a soft focus interview with Pol Pot, if she thought the ratings would be there. She endured John Stossel for years on 20/20 without so much as smacking him senseless. Clearly, a model of restraint.

Of course, the whole thing is incredibly tacky, but doesn't it beat those teary-eyed montages for Katie Couric by a long shot? Personally, I think they should've just moved to another studio and not told her.

Lifestyles of the Middle Class and Obscure

Rather that presenting another thrilling anecdote about sweating, I thought I'd post some long overdue photos of my new(ish) condo. Now, these were taken while the prior owners still lived there, mind you, so they won't have my minimalistic decorating flair.

Here's the fireplace. It really comes in handy in June. It does make me feel all classy, though, like I should smoke a pipe and own a bunch of nicely-bound books I've never ready. Maybe some day.

Here's the second bedroom, which they used as an office. It has a stunning view of our neighbors' porch. They also had a whole lot of cool medieval swords on the wall, which my sister chose to make fun of in their presence. We're smooth like that.

This is the master bedroom. There's some sort of horrifying futuristic device on the bedside table. It probably sucks out your soul. But at least they had a big person bed. Mine is shaped like a racecar.

Can we also note that my photography skills are unbelievably poor? Seriously, it's like I took these pictures while being shaken about in a burlap bag. But anyway, this is the master bath. I have used this tub about three times since moving in.

Sick Day

Last night I awoke at 3 AM with the worst chills and fever I have ever had. I was so cold that I had actually been dreaming about being cold (and also about being best friends with Sarah Michelle Gellar, but that's a story for another time), and had apparently in my sleep piled a number of items of clothing and even a couple of towels on top of me. When I woke up, I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I felt sure that I was probably going to die. I stumbled into my bathroom to look for some Nyquil, only to find that, though I had three boxes of band-aids, enough shout wipes to service an entire kindergarten, and approximately seven thousand skin products I didn't even know existed, the height of my cold-alleviating products was a bottle of Tylenol. At that point, I cried a little, and then I went into Roommate Liz's bathroom to see if the Benadryl Fairy had perhaps paid a visit. All I came up with was a curling iron and an embarrassingly ample supply of q-tips. I considered walking to the Shell station in my boxers to purchase a $20 box of cold medicine, but cooler thoughts prevailed, and I settled on a Tylenol and a couple of tall glasses of water. Then I lay in my bed adding and removing covers in 15 minute increments while watching MTV's next (which is much more entertaining when you're delusional, by the way) before finally falling asleep again just after 5:30. It was an astonishing night.

Today, of course, I feel relatively fine. I went for a run and even assembled some rather complicated furniture. But for the record, getting sick on the weekend is NOT OKAY. Make it happen on a Tuesday, just before some meeting I'm dying to get out of.

Next to Godliness

I have recently hired a cleaning lady. I find this weird for a number of reasons. First of all, I don't think I'm old or competent enough to have anyone in my employ, much less a little Polish lady in her fifties. I feel like she should be paying me nickels to mow her lawn in classic adorable child labor style. Secondly, I hate admitting I can't do it myself, although a few minutes on my hands and knees attacking the bathroom corners with a toothbrush certainly convinced me that was the case. Finally, it's kind of odd to me that there's someone in my house each week while I'm not there. Do you think she tries on my clothes? Maybe gets naked and rolls around in my bed? Not that that's what I'd do if I were a cleaning person.

But I have to admit it's also completely wonderful. She's so incredibly thorough that the first time she came she even cleaned the twisted fragments of the chair our old landlord took a hatchet to upon our parting of ways. And she goes through a half bottle of Windex every time she visits. (Hopefully she's not huffing it or something. Can you huff Windex?) She does like to rearrange the objects on my various tables in such a way as to confuse and confound me, but there are certainly worse things she could do. Like steal from me, for instance. And so far so good on that front.

Many Amazing Excuses for Missing Father's Day

-- Trapped in a well.
-- Sports Illustrated falsely assured you the football phone would be delivered on time.
-- Cold and distant relationship.
-- Your father is Woody Allen, so you always give combined Father's Day/Anniversary gifts.
-- Spray paint on macaroni necklace was still drying.
-- J.C. Penney was all out of horrific ties.
-- Thought that Tad was your father your whole life; turns out it was really his evil twin Ted. (For soap opera characters only.)
-- Always get it confused with Boxing Day.
-- Sending a gift would actually violate the terms of the settlement.
-- Oprah was on.
-- Picking out hats all day.
-- Too busy bringing unsolicited freedom to the Iraqi people.
-- Too busy bringing unsolicited freedom to Britney Spears.
-- Lost in George Clooney's eyes.

A Tragic Story

A blind man tripped me with his cane today.

I mean, it wasn't intentional, I don't think. I hadn't given him any money when he came through my el car panhandling, but it didn't seem like a revenge thing. For one thing, I somehow doubt that he got a solid ID on me. For another, he asked God to bless me as he passed through. I mean, Who Would Jesus Trip? Well, maybe some Pharisees.

But anyway, when I got off at my stop, I got a fair-sized portion of hickory jammed between my legs. At this point, I'm pretty sure I broke some el platform records for distance tripping. I may still set some records for skin grafting. It was not a pretty sight. (No pun intended.)

I think I may have to start just taking cabs everywhere.

Dispatches from the Front

My Blockbuster closed down without telling me. I showed up, all ready to be dazzled by Hollywood's brightest stars, and the shelves stood forlorn and empty without their copies of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and She's All That. No more sassy clerk downing half a box of Snowcaps with one hand while silently judging your copy of Never Been Kissed with the other. No more forever untouched copies of Blender magazine. Just gone.

Thank God I didn't have anything checked out at the time. Think of the late fees.

I almost died of heat exhaustion today. I have a fun habit of going for runs in 90 degree heat. It's kind of exciting because I turn bright red and people around me eye me as though I may well explode. But I drank six glasses of water, so I think I'm covered.

Tonight I'm going to a fundraising gala on behalf of my firm. It's black tie optional, so I've opted to not. These things are always so spectacularly awkward that there's sure to be fun in store. I'll have act very impressed by accomplishments people have that I don't understand and chat politely with old people about the weather. And then there will be the chicken. Is it too much to hope for a fistfight, OC style?

Comedy and Tragedy

Last night I attended three hours of student sketch comedy, which was uncomfortable in many respects. To begin with, there was the physical aspect -- my rear is simply not designed to withstand such an extended interaction with a hard plastic chair, and my work clothes, in addition to making me look like a transgendered nun, tend to ride up into places I didn't even know I had after twelve or so hours of extended wear. But the emotional aspect was really far more compelling. To listen to off-key warbling of political satire on a Weekly Reader level is never easy; to do it with the warbler's elderly mother sitting there beaming at the stage a few seats away is damned near impossible. And to realize that you may be the only person in the room who doesn't find simulated anal and oral rape hilarious is not exactly a picnic, either.

Speaking of which, here is a list of topics that are apparently laugh riots, as gathered during last night's program: slavery, child molestation, homosexuality, aging, parking tickets, waitressing, yuppies, asians, the cubs, stalkers, one night stands, and leukemia. I was hoping for a gag about airline peanuts, but it was never forthcoming.

But despite the extent to which I am apparently completely out of touch with America, I actually really enjoyed a large portion of the evening. A couple of my friends were in it, which gave me that high school musical type rooting interest, and there were a lot of sketches that really stayed true to their characters and had some nice, truthful moments. If only I could have watched it from my couch in my pajamas!

Footnotes

-- Impulse Buys. Thanks to our inability to control ourselves in the face of a buy one get one free sale at the secondhand CD store, my sister and I now own a recorded testament to the singing career of one Sarah Jessica Parker. I maintain that for $1.50 I should be able to buy SJP herself.

-- Cars. Definitive proof that I am unable to handle the concept of vehicles falling in love. But undeniably the King Lear of animated works starring Larry the Cable Guy.

-- Cars, Part II. I accidentally left my wallet sitting out on the front seat of mine all night on Saturday. For my follow up, I think I'll staple blank checks to myself and pass out on a park bench.

-- Stability. In celebration of Chicago's Weekend Without Sun, I spent last night leaving morbid messages for half the people in my phone book, eating six Ho Hos, watching part of a documentary on the Holocaust, and going to bed at 10:30. Come next January I think I'm just going to hibernate.

-- Ann Coulter. I'm hoping that next she takes on puppies and handicapped nuns. Freeloaders.

Holding Patterns

It's been a frustratingly non-productive couple of days. Thursday night my sister and I spent an hour and a half driving around the same six streets in Wrigleyville trying to find a parking spot before finally deciding just to pay $12 for eight hours of asphalt. There were so many signs restricting parking that I have to believe they were making some of them up (there's no such thing as a "Robert Goulet Zone," right?). And promising stretches of virgin curbside kept turning into hydrant zones, making me want to set a few fires of my own. As with so many of my family memories, the whole thing ended with us vowing never to speak of it again.

Then yesterday we went to the Old Town Art Fair, which is typically one of my favorite events of the summer. This year, however, it ended up being several hours of standing around in the cold, feigning interest in watercolors and wishing the corpulent man eating a funnel cake at least two inches into your personal space would have seen fit to not wear shorts. So we ditched out for an evening of playing Taboo ("So there was this guy, Adolf BLANK, and he killed a lot of BLANKS, and we call that the BLANK.") and eating bar food so fatty it should be served with a heart pump. We definitely live hard and fast in my family.

So far, today's not exactly a firestorm of activity, either, although I did wake up at 8:30 because several girls were talking loudly about someone's penis on one of the balconies next door. If that's not a sign of great things to come, I don't know what is.

Off the Shelf

I'm trying to read "The Naked and the Dead" right now. Unfortunately, there has been approximately zero nudity so far, unless you count someone's shirt flying up when their intestines get blown out, and a whole lot of the death part. I pride myself on never giving up on a book, but war novels are a real test for me, ever since I was totally disappointed in the seventh grade by the narrator not dying at the end of The Red Badge of Courage (I swear someone told me he did). I guess it's kind of tough for me to get invested in characters when I know they'll likely be bayoneted within twenty pages. Plus, I'm so not about gross stuff. I didn't even watch ER back when Clooney was still on it.

With a slightly lower body count were the lovely short stories by Lorrie Moore I plowed through a few weeks ago. At first I was afraid she was going to be one of those gimmicky, write-about-gay-midget-satanists-in-space kind of authors, but there was a good deal of carefully-observed truth to her stuff that had me hooked by the third story. And there's plenty of fun with words for the linguistic nerds, too. It's a recommend.

Also read a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Crane. Eh.

But my highlight of the past few months has to be the R.M. Koster novel I read, "The Prince." It wasn't as polished or as potent as his other work, and it did indulge in some very uncharacteristic grotesquerie, but it was still a really enjoyable bit of magical realism. Also, I thought, very insightful with regard to Latin American politics, although admittedly everything I know about Latin American politics comes from magical realism and Woody Allen's Bananas. But anyway, don't take my word for it, check it out at your local library!

Disappointment

I had my first condo association meeting last night, and I was sure it would just be a treasure trove of comedy. I've heard so many horror stories from friends about people getting into shouting matches over grilling rights and dividing common areas with tape lines Brady Bunch style that I was sure we would have at least a fistfight. Everyone knows that condo associations are like disfunctional families, where people take every opportunity to air their unrelated grievances no matter the topic at hand and frequently drink from an ill-concealed hip flask. And when it took us approximately six days of emailing to set up a meeting date a month and a half in the future (and there are only six of us!), I got my hopes up. When the mere occurrence of an unknown man saying "hello" on the front sidewalk led to yet another email exchange of a seriousness generally reserved only for Holocaust novels and presidential eulogies, my hopes were raised further still. I blocked out three hours in my schedule and wore long sleeves to protect against potential claw marks.

Unfortunately, the meeting was only half an hour long and entirely cheerful and rational. We elected officers, deeming the person who didn't show up to have waged a successful campaign for president. We divided up chores (we took "putting the trash out") and decided to have the windows cleaned (I suggested merely buying a harness and lowering my cleaning lady down from the roof, but this was thought uninsurable). And we adjourned so that our upstairs neighbor could go watch the Sopranos. No bloodshed whatsoever.

I did get elected Secretary, though (I'm totally putting that on my resume), so I figure I can try to slant the minutes Fox News style and stir up controversy. How does "Activist Treasurer Wages Ultraliberal Campaign of State-Supported Window Washing" sound?

Reefer Madness

Although I am personally a total clean teen, primarily because I don't want have the fact that I was "smoking LSD pills" end up on my "permanent record," I recently had a rather lengthy conversation with a friend about how one makes pot brownies. My position was that you probably had to prepare the pot in some way -- or at the very least chop it up -- before putting it in the batter. I mean, even vegetables get washed and diced before they go into your casserole (this is, of course, a hypothetical casserole, as the last time I cooked I'm pretty sure I was still taking driver's ed and reeling from the loss of The Golden Girls), and you don't buy them from a greasy-looking friend of your cousin's named Stan. But of course this theory was met with a lot of sarcasm, including the suggestion that perhaps one should pan sear or glaze one's 420. (On a slightly related note, this was the first year I ever understood where everyone was on 4/20.) The net result was an Internet search on the topic, which vindicated me somewhat, but left me wondering if the people from the tech department might report me to the managing partner as a stoner. I do frequently snack heavily late at night.

Travels

Yesterday was a bit rough. I had to get up at 5:15 to drive to a tiny town downstate for a deposition. Of course, I ended up doing that thing where I wake up in the middle of the night and decide in my sleep-addled logic that it will be okay for me to reset the alarm clock, so I ended up waking at 5:45, but who's counting? All that matters is that I didn't have time to shower and I ended up accidentally grabbing one of Roommate Liz's shirts rather than my own. Good times.

Anyway, we managed to get on the road in time to sit in awful traffic for an hour and a half, during which time I threatened to make everyone play license plate bingo and other child abusive games from our family car trip pasts. I also debuted the theory that I should pretend I was an android when we got to the deposition and make all my objections based on the premise that the questions "do not compute." Oh, and we rocked out to some Mariah Carey and Boys II Men, which I learned is not the same group as All 4 One. The Corolla was a very happy place.

Of course, all of this changed at the actual deposition, where opposing counsel, a tiny, angry man obviously still getting over the fact that Patti Keller broke up with him when he was cut from the JV wrestling squad in high school, decided to prove his manhood by gratuitously screaming at us and our client. The amount of moral outrage involved seemed somewhat out of place given that the allegations of the case were fraud rather than, say, genocide. When we told him he was being ridiculous, he responded that we were "more ridiculous," and I was tempted to respond that he was being "ridiculous to the power of infinity plus one." It was all very sophisticated.

My major disappointment was that no one wanted to stop at either the corn maze or the outlet mall on the way back. I mean, come on, who doesn't want some scratched and dented Clairborn products?