The Internet Is For, Well, You Know

This morning, devoted partner and I shared a meaningful moment. If you're a couple, then I'm sure you'll know what I mean. Those unexpected times when your love calls out to you, something funny in his or her voice, and says those six words every lover wants to hear,

"I just saw Brett Favre's (rhymes with) sock!"

Eagerly, I took the stairs quickly, the surprise and anticipation in my voice, "really?"

Apparently, there's a new tactic in wooing that the kids (who the hell am I kidding, Brett Favre is like 108) involving photographing your junk and sending it along. I know that this must work since I am forever lamenting the lack of junk photos in my inbox and encouraging devoted partner, and really anyone else, to snap and send.

For a moment, let's just get the unspoken out there so that others may be spared: don't photograph your genitals. Don't! If you absolutely must photograph your genitals, do not ever email them anywhere. Ever! Unless your genitals are being photographed by Herb Ritts, you will not be pleased by what happens after others see the picture. I myself felt no compunction mocking Brett Favre's absolutely average genitals. And this was long before I mocked his motivation for photographing them in the first place.

And let's talk about that, Brett. I'm a woman. I like the genitals of men. Under no circumstances do I ever want to receive an email from someone I'm not already sleeping with (and frankly, I'm not that into receiving one from someone I am sleeping with as, presumably, I already know what they look like) showing a disembodied meat puppet. This is an ego thing, I guess. You think women don't care about the rest of you as much as they care about your vaunted pokey toy. This is a fallacy. And the only kinds of people who send these kinds of pictures are gross people with whom, if we weren't already sleeping, we certainly wouldn't start and, had we started, might consider stopping.

Flowers are nice. They say, "hey I'm interested in having a relatively meaningless casual affair with you based primarily on how you look in a cheerleading outfit" without, say, being disgusting. Now, I can understand if you gave her the picture so that she could supplement her income by selling it, but I think you missed out on the part of the equation that necessitated other people seeing it (I'm thinking your wife, kids, grade school teachers, etc. oh wait, Wikipedia also informs me you have a grandchild - kudos) if the young lady was to reap profits. Would it have not been easier to simply let 10 grand fall out of your pocket?

I am not the only one, Mr. Favre, who has now laughed not only at your grand scale stupidity, but also at your decidedly NOT grand scale Leaning Tower of Pisa. In fact we're laughing at you more than we did when you said you were retiring. We're laughing at you because dumb is funny and you seem to have gotten enough dumb to keep us entertained for quite some time.

Like Finding Kryptonite

If you were a child of the 80s If you were a child of the 80s exactly like me, two things were true: 1. CandyLand probably did exist and your crap parents just weren't telling you where it was and 2. You pretty much anticipated this kind of underground camaraderie to occur with frequency (NB: I realize this is a film made in the 90s, but taking place in the early 80s)



Now that I'm a grown-up, I understand that these youthful fantasies were arrived at after less than logical argument, but the little girl inside of me still hopes.

And, in fact, one frequently does encounter boisterousness on the subway, but the person singing out loud is either a) soliciting things or b) crazy. C'est la vie. Sometimes you want to shake your ass, but embarrassment prevents you. Also, if you're anything like me, the ass-shaking in question isn't exactly fly girl-ready.

Well, the other day, devoted partner showed me a video. Easily the best video I've seen since Oh, Son, Your Missus is a Nutter (worth watching, but there are bad words and adult humor if you're in on of those offices where people notice such things)



The song was so good, it made me spontaneously break into dance. So good that I gladly paid my 99 cents for the privilege of having it on my iToy. So good that I listened to it on the way to the station, walking from my car to the platform, and thirdly while on the train. It's the kind of song you can not help but tap your feet to.

Apropos of an earlier post this week, I am ready to declare a winner in the World Series of Poor Breeding that is the New Haven line. It's not gayporn guy, muddy feet on seat girl, nosepicker, doucheoncellphoneblabbingaboutderivatives, Fran Drescher soundalikes talking about how tacky cousin Morty's Bar Mitzvah was. No. All of those able contenders have apparently been left bloodied on the field of battle by

Excessive Foot Tapping.

I swear to effin jeebus, the overly tanned J Crew dad sitting behind me actually tapped me on the shoulder to tell me my foot tapping was bothering him. I stopped, obviously, but not before marveling at what does and does not pass for appropriate behavior. It also gave me powerful ammunition for the next time someone does something that bothers me: my foot tapping might well drive cellphonedouche out of his skull.

But that's not important. What's important is that I've won something. You might think it's not that special, but knowing that my, and only my, behavior was so detestable that it merited intervention is special to me. After documenting the truly tasteless behavior of everyone else, it's nice to know that it was I all along.

So rather than give a lengthy victory speech, I thought I would let the song that started this whole mess speak for me.

Fellow commuters, this one's for you (if your office is unfriendly to the f-bomb, please watch this at home - but WATCH IT, IT'S AWESOME):

I'm Sure I'll Feel Differently If I Ever Have Some

In order to fly out of the eminently civilized Westchester airport I made the concession that my flights to and from Portland would not be direct. I was ok with this as the price was the same as a direct from JFK and the connection times were reasonable. But sometimes simplicity is just not attainable.

I was scheduled to leave Thursday afternoon. I ended up leaving Friday afternoon and, trust me, this was the best of all possible scenarios. Combine FAA rules governing presidential visits and airspace with a thunderstorm of significant proportions and you end up with a plane waiting on the tarmac with sporadic air conditioning for nearly three hours. I'll have you know I was among the calmest people on board. I even wrote a letter to Delta telling them how well their people handled things. While the mumblers were carrying on about the ridiculosity of our being trapped in this maelstrom, I did some critical thinking.

The airport knew that there was going to be a mandatory closing of airspace and they rushed like hell to get all the scheduled planes out ahead of it. We would have been among them had it not been for one teeny tiny thing that in other circumstances would not have occasioned a three hour delay. There was a family with three small children who successfully convinced the gate agent that they could schlep all of their strollers on the plane; then they encountered our more vigilant flight attendant who told them that they must be out of their minds and that it was highly illegal to have their behemoth child carriers blocking the aisle of the plane (she said it way nicer than that). In the ten or so minutes it took to sort out that mess, we missed the window of opportunity to get off the ground before the airport was temporarily closed.

I'm not opposed to children qua children, but I'm really really opposed to being around them. In certain circumstances. Since, with the exception of a family's moving to a new home, there is no REASON why young children need to take planes, I'm at a loss to explain why so many do. Or rather why so many parents blatantly ignore the inconvenience their children are about to occasion and take them flying anyway. I read travel websites and know that whenever the subject of kids-only flights or adults-only flights or anything that infringes on the rights of our non-tax paying toddlers, eruptions occur. In a culture of entitlement, how could it be otherwise? I've started to consider just how much money it would be worth to me to travel on adults-only flights and I'm currently at $100. Airlines, take note.

But while you're noting that, allow me to make a possibly less radical suggestion:

CHILDREN SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED ON RED-EYE FLIGHTS

NEVER

On my return trip I was shocked and appalled to see not one but two very young children in the boarding area. If you must take your pre-verbal, pre-logic, pre-toilet-trained larva on a plane, what possible lapse of reason and etiquette prompted you to book your mewling progeny on a flight where EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANE WILL WANT TO SLEEP? I'm assuming you have to declare your infant when making a reservation and airlines should refuse to give you one if it's an overnight flight. This seems a no-brainer. And parents should exercise a modicum of good taste in never trying to book those flights. Your kid has a bad day and an entire plane load of people suffers. Why would you do this? How did it come to pass that you arrived at that level of selfishness? 100 businesspeople should lose a night of already uncomfortable sleep so that you can drag your kid cross-country? It just boggles the mind.

I'm not a parent and who knows if I will be someday, but I vow this to you, and waybackmachine will have it on record, should I be a traveling parent, you will not hear my child. If I MUST travel somewhere with little Ghengis, he will be appropriately, well, drunk. Yes, you heard it here. I will be doling out the thimblefuls of wine so that he may sleep, you may sleep, I may sleep. European wine producing countries routinely give their children little doses of wine and they haven't yet discovered that those children are horribly scarred, so I'm going to go with that. And I'm counting on you all to back me up when they arrest me!

Don't Worry, I Can Still Be Unpleasant

There was some concern after yesterday's post that I was going to go all Buddhist on you all and think everything was sunshine and rainbow puppies. Calm yourselves. I can be a bitch without being angry. Never more so then when watching, what this year felt interminably long, the Academy Awards.

Now there are many sites better than this one where you can go to dish about the (yawn) outfits people wore (they were really really boring this year, I felt I was at the Fire and Ice ball, just a sea of red, white, and black), but I would like to tackle a far less kind issue: age. I have a number of theories as to why Hollywood seems to do to its talent what the poor choice of grails did to the blonde nazi in Last Crusade, but it is never more apparent than during closeups on a night when the stars have, presumably gone all out. And lest you think I'm just being mean because I myself am not a Hollywood star...eh, I got nothing. Maybe I am being mean for no good reason. But still, maybe I can spin this as a warning to others about the dangers of not taking care of your skin (while you obsessively take care of your biceps - maybe they could make vials of moisturizer that weighed 15 pounds).

Example #1 - Kathy Ireland. Real age: almost 47. Neck age: crypt keeper. Remember super cute Kathy Ireland? With her gorgeous eyes and BROWN hair? Remember how she was in shape but not in a scary way (like the difference in shape between Brenda and Kelly in original 90210 and the Steve Madden heads-to-big-for-bodies girls in new 90210?). Remember this? Diagnosis: too much bronzer, too much frosted hair, too much working out, not enough sensible menu choices, abject failure in the moisturizing of neck.

Example #2 - Kate Winslet. Real age: 34. Age I thought she was: >40. Now Kate Winslet gets a lot of crap for, I don't know, being too fat but photographing thinner, being too thin but claiming to be fatter...I don't care. I do care that it looks as though she has a centimeter worth of pancake makeup on. Could her skin really be that bad? And if so, is she not wealthy enough to fix that? Also, and this is a common complaint of mine: platinum hair + pale skin + pale makeup = ugh. Bright red lipstick would have changed this a little, though my primary complaint is when actresses match their hair to their skin. See examples A (also only 34), B (age 43 terrifyingly tight unemotional years), and C (age 25, but already coloring herself like a woman twice her age). Now, I'm not a huge fan of Cameron Diaz's style, but all blondes should look to her for advice on how to be blond.

Example #3 - Miley Cyrus. Real age: 17. Osteoporosis age: older than this. Now, unlike many others, I don't have a visceral reaction to the young Miss Cyrus. I don't even really know who she is because I don't have children. I do know, however, that she has linebacker shoulders and an underfed upper ribcage which hunching just accentuates. Additionally, I am guessing she has really really nice young 17-year old skin. Which I cannot see. Because she is orange. Her face and body do not match. Also, as slender as she is on top, her dress STILL doesn't fit, making her look like those much older women who try to squeeze themselves into the dresses they wore at 17.

So while I occasionally snipe at your crow's feet, collective Hollywood ladies, I really have concern in my heart. You are all, I presume, way better looking than this, and I do not understand why you go to so much trouble and effort to look older than you are.

But lest I appear sexist, though it is a sad truth that age on men is deemed more flattering than age on women, let me draw your attention to this neck. I'll admit, it was far more terrifying on last week's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, but Sean Penn is sporting Clint Eastwood's neck, and he should be concerned about that, what with the 30 YEAR AGE DIFFERENCE.

And it is also important, though frequently mentioned, to acknowledge the women who are clearly not 25, but also clearly wearing age very very well: Meryl Streep (age 60), Sigourney Weaver (age 60), Helen Mirren (age 64). And two of those women are blondes, a group not generally on the receiving end of kind aging.