Losing Friends, One Fanboy at a Time

Are you people for real?

I conservatively estimate that 80% of you have been going on and on and on about this for years; some of you I trust in matters aesthetic, some of you, certainly not, but until now, that didn't really affect our friendship. And I know that tastes differ, but 80%? That's a pretty tough to debate number, and you people are everywhere. Talking about it, asking people to not talk about it until you catch up, having parties and countdowns about it.

Well, last night, we attempted to join your ranks. Despite my long-held belief that it was a pile of dross, I attempted to clear my mind and heart of prejudice long enough to sit down and watch...

the pilot episode of...

Lost.

...

...

...

And I repeat my self: are you people for real?

It was EXACTLY everything I feared it would be: intellectually lazy, preposterous, and an unironic, unintended demonstration of the idea that there's nothing new under the sun. Just so you don't think I was hasty, we watched the entire first disc - four episodes, each more laughably pathetic than the previous.

My friends, my friends, are you perhaps familiar with the website TV Tropes? Cause the writers of Lost are certainly familiar with it. I know this because every hackneyed, overused, underachieving one that exists has been used in the creation of Lost and, not to put too fine a point on it, but has any of you watched Predator recently...? Is no one concerned at the central-casting stereotypes that populate this island: I'm a bad boy, I'm a girl with a past, I'm a sidekick, I'm a redshirt, I'm a terrorist (btw, the darkest Iraqi ever discovered, possibly because he's Indian, though I realize that my complaints about never casting Arabs in Arab roles is fodder for another day), I'm Jesus Christ who gives a shit? I can't believe that four episodes went by without anyone saying, "well, back when I was in 'Nam," that's how caricaturish this ensemble is.

So, before every one of you has a chance to erase me from your contact lists, I'll simply say that Lost is the aughts' Twin Peaks; a show that makes the X-Files look realistic. Now that I have empirical experience with the show, I will return to mocking the rest of you and sadly for you, you will not be able to fall back on the, "but you've never even seen it" defense.

I have. It sucked. Let's move on.

Compromising My Blogging Integrity

You're My Brother and I Love You...
but for the love of all things holy, shutup!
I asked nicely, really I did.
An untrained eye wouldn't have even seen
the glint of "or I swear to god
I will stab you in the neck with my knitting needle."
Originally uploaded by reallyct

So, even though I know a lot more about this guy (what he looks like head-on and his name), after an especially poorly-timed walking out the door "discussion" with devoted partner, I am erring on the side of not having this flucktard show up on my doorstep threatening to bean me in the head with a can of Schlitz.

Apparently there was a gruesome murder/attempted suicide that happened in Westchester the other day. I wouldn't have known about it because I selectively listen to 1010WINS and since people are always killing other people, I can kind of drown it out. Fortunately, this guy, who I'm going to call "Fredo" so you can sort of understand the level of esteem I hold him in, knew the family involved and was re-telling the gruesome details to his friend on the phone. Next to me. On the train. In what I would conservatively estimate was 45% louder than a normal speaking voice. While, I like a good hanging stabbing story as much as the next girl, I decided that this was not appropriate public behavior and, as nicely as I could, asked him if he could please (I used the word please) lower his voice. When he didn't I added that it was kind of an inappropriate and graphic topic for public.

Instead of heeding what was, in all likelihood, my nicest version of what I wanted to say to him, he continued telling his story in his 45% louder than normal voice.

Then he called, literally, 3 other people and told the same story.

In between, he called some buddies so he could gossip about one of their wife/girlfriend's habit of "talking like a man," the remedy for which he described as "punching her like a man." He called maybe 3 buddies and said the above verbatim.

Even the least familiar of you with my particular brand of crazy can probably imagine that it took all my self-control not to talk to this man like a man so that I could precipitate his punching me like a man which would lead to his being incarcerated like a man, and then suddenly learning what it's like to be surrounded by, ahem, those more manly than one in a prison-type situation.

I really weighed the consequence: my broken jaw for his difficulty sitting/evacuating for a period of, oh I don't know what you get for first degree assault, but let's say he gets off easy with a year. I still am not sure I made the right decision in not provoking him. I would have enjoyed visiting him in jail and bringing him care packages of vaseline and kleenex. For his tears.

But let's be frank. Any dbag who publicly advocates hitting women who have the gall to, well, talk, is the kind of dbag whose mother probably still folds his underwear. He'd be about as likely to hit me as buy me a new Cadillac. Fredo was about as intimidating as a Jack Russell terrier. Still, I have to wonder about the kind of person who won't shutup when asked to. I knew that after I asked him to lower his voice, he was talking loudly and making multiple phone calls just to annoy me (at one point he moved up one row so we were directly opposite from one another). I know that his choice of conversation topics was aimed at me (you know how I enjoy talking like a man). And I know that the best course of action was to continue silently knitting and not engaging him further.

But it wasn't the fun course of action. Stupid adulthood.

The 2nd Most Extreme Friend Eats Dinner

Chef Mimi's Revenge
If you can believe it, there's more dessert out of frame.
Originally uploaded by reallyct

I'm so pleased that my father doesn't really know how to use the internet because this posting pretty much eradicates all the hebrew school and zionist summer camp foisted upon us children. It happened during my first visit to dbgb where The Boy works and where my former pastry chef boss now presides. I'll admit, when The Boy moved from Bistro to gb, I was sad; after all, I get pangs of something akin to love just thinking about the scallops and I'll admit, I did anything I could to get Mamadou and Ali to share their french fries on nights when the kitchen sent them down. So, my first impression was, eh, sausage.

Let me say that the sausage has won and I have lost (though when I bravely stepped on Herr Scale this morning, I was pleased to know that no long-term damage had been done). Actually, it might be safe to say that the graceful and noble pig, even in death, totally pwned me.

The menu at dbgb can be a mite bit intimidating, especially if you were once a child who refused all foodstuffs save grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti with (yes) cheese, and some non-cheese-related items such as pb&j and broiled chicken breast with rice. Veal tongue? Pigs' feet? Duck gizzard (which incidentally, Ed, is esophagus)? These were not on offer in yon childhood. And, truth be told, while my diet is so preposterously more varied than I ever could have feared as an 8-year old (hell, I get nostalgic for the barnacles Antonio made us eat), I do fear that some things will still squick me.

But I had a point to prove. You see, recently Ed admitted that we may well be, devoted partner and I, his 2nd Most Xtreme Friends. This pleased me immensely and definitely made parasailing in Turkey a priority. Surely, a 2nd Most Extreme Friend would not shy away from head cheese (which has NO CHEESE in it). And Ed was really psyched about the head cheese which I was frankly terrified by. After all, while I have happily eaten beef cheeks, and possibly halibut cheeks, I felt certain that head cheese would look a little too much like head for my comfort.

Yeah, well, obviously I'm an idiot, and secondly, Etienne is sneaky. Head cheese? I've been eating that crap for years. Mushy porky bits tied together by gelatinous ooze? Yeah, the goddamned French have been surreptitiously feeding it to me for ages - I hope you guys got a good laugh out of that. So, turns out, I love head cheese.

But the 2nd Most Extreme Friend was not about to stop at a little mushed together boiled-off pig head terrine. I have studiously avoided boudin noir each and every visit to the aforementioned French. Vinie loves it, Etienne does not, and frankly, I wasn't so sure I liked sausage enough to want it bound by pork blood. But I hear things, one of which was that the boudin noir at dbgb was awesome so when Ed omitted it from his menu wishlist, I put it back on. No way was I going to let a little pig's blood get in the way of my Xtreme-ness. The verdict: not my favorite, but nothing to get worried about.

Finally, as we make our way down the pig, we got to his crispy trotters. Easy. Been there, done that, made the trip to Montreal.

In between there were other delightful things, most surprisingly the calamari salad which I a) ate and b) loved. I'm generally not a go-to squid kinda gal, but The Boy brought it to us, so I dutifully ate it and then went back for more. The sausage injected with cheddar cheese served atop an unnecessarily thick potato pancake? Yeah, that was a big win. Also I liked the pork and duck gizzard sausage quite a lot, and not just because it was like cassoulet in a tube.

But I knew there was more coming. I knew this because Chef Mimi told me to save room for dessert, which I knew could not mean anything good for the waistline. Sure enough, 7, yes 7 desserts came to the table: meyer lemon tart, blood orange chocolate cake, coconut pineapple kalamansi ice cream sandwich, mandarin souffle, and three ice cream sundaes, honey grapefruit, coffee bourbon, and mint chocolate. Needless to say only a couple of bites could be managed of each though all, under less stuffed circumstances could have easily been consumed in their entirety.

The 2nd Most Extreme Friend draws the line at boot and rally.

But, No, Really, I'm Not That Good

In a fit of extreme economic intransigence, I have been wasting my audible credits. Having poured who knows how much useful money down audible's gullet, I sought to rectify the problem by using some of my credits this weekend. Devoted partner and I wish to learn some Spanish, so I got us some Spanish 1, and I, in preparation for the daunting task of acting as translator between my parents and Etienne's, thought I'd do some refresher work in French, downloading French 3.

This was a mistake as it gave me an inflated sense of self. I should have known when the English introduction kept harping on about how this course would allow me to have interactions while traveling that I might not gain much from it, but when the lesson started with, "would you like to come to my house for dinner next weekend?" I knew I had just been screwed out of an audible credit.

If you have ever had occasion to speak French with me, you'll know I'm no great shakes. Yes we can go on about how frickin' impressive it is that I taught myself, but when you listen to me actually speak, or better yet be incapable of answering the sous chef's "do you eat pork?" because I couldn't decipher his accent, you'll know that to call me an intermediate student of French is generous.

Still, I can handle do you want to come to my house for dinner next weekend. Because I've been doing this for over ten years. And now we come to the dilemma: it appears that there are no more audio courses available to someone like me who can get along perfectly well in everyday situations, but would like to be able to speak at least half as intelligently in French as I can in English and, more importantly, understand the intelligent speech of others.

This isn't difficult, you say, why there's an Alliance Francaise right in Greenwich. Yes, this is true, however, due to the unusual nature of my French acquisition, I don't readily fit into a group class - I have a mixture of really advanced concepts tempered by some inabilities that a French 1 student would scoff at - and the private lessons are ridiculously overpriced - I want to speak better French, but not at $80/hour.

And I'm pretty damn picky when it comes to tutors. Yes, I could go back to the tutor I had five or so years ago who I really really liked, but she's in Tribeca and I'm not sure I'm willing to commit to that...again. The others I've tried have been uniformly, well, children. One of whom spent our lessons trying to convince me, albeit in French, that the CIA planned the World Trade Center attacks. The tutor has to be actually from France, not Quebec, not Brussels, not Rwanda, and preferably not from the very-difficult-for-a-novice-to-understand Marseilles regions. And, since there are things I should be learning, perhaps someone who has ever taught before, not just someone who happens to be French.

So I'm going to give a look around the neighborhood and see if I can find some native French speakers who will tutor me in the Fairfield county at a rate more friendly than the Alliance's (though I will consider looking into their next period's intermediate classes), but I did so hope I could have just done it on the train with the iPod.

The Tao of Vince

Devoted partner claims that were I to write this post using specifics, angry people from across the interweb would somehow find my little site and make anger on me. So, in a nod to the charming paranoia of the charming devoted partner, let's generalize.

Badass. That's what Americans want to be. The cowboys, the marines, the manifest destinizers. And you know what those three groups have in common: they feel no pain. Shoot a marine in the knee and he'll limp at you with guns a blazin' to wreck your shit up. Or at least that's what popular culture has conceived. And frankly, it's an ethos I'm comfortable with. Americans will soldier on uncomplainingly. And if you ask about a hardship, Americans will sneer at you, John Wayne-style, and claim not to know what you're talking about (or, will offer to punch your lights out with their stump of an arm).

Or at least that used to be what Americans were like. In my lifetime, I definitely sense a shift from never letting 'em see you bleed, to doing a 10-talk show circuit discussing the minutiae of your bleeding. Much like explaining the punchline because you think your audience won't get it, today's competitors think that it isn't enough for the announcer to mention that the day before the event a wild moose bit off your thumb - they think the audience won't understand that it is supremely badass to compete with a rabid-moose-inflicted severed thumb, instead they must remind you, ad nauseam, how painful and difficult it was to compete with only nine digits.

Reporter: So, we hear a moose bit your thumb off, how did that affect your performance?

Old American: (ignoring blood dripping from open wound) I don't know what you're talking about. I came here to win Olympic gold and that's what I did.

New American: OMG, I know, it was, like totally, so painful and I didn't know if I was going to be able to compete, and like it just hurt so much.

New American seems emblematic of an easily conquerable people.

We already KNOW that if you're injured, it makes a winning performance that much more admirable; bitching about your injury makes you seem like a pussy. And, after the ninth time you're interviewed about your (in the grand scheme of things, minor) injury and you make a big deal out of something that equates a hangnail with Greg Louganis's losing half of his head to a diving board, my opinion towards you changes: I now want you to lose.

I want you to lose because I don't think you're doing your part for the myth of Americans, and I like the myth of Americans. I watched Ski Cross this weekend, and there was a guy who DISLOCATED HIS HIP 3 WEEKS AGO at the X-Games, and when asked about it, he locked his jaw in a smile and said, essentially, "I feel great, No problems at all. Everything is a-ok."

I hope he wins medals in sports he's not even competing in! He is holding up his end of the American Badass bargain (similarly, the kid who severed half his leg at the Olympic trials in speed skating and then won a medal took a decidedly badass stance as well). I know that when the Olympics are over, all of these winning athletes need to parlay their winning into paying jobs (thus the absolutely ridiculous habit of wearing eye makeup during competition for athletes who are not figure skaters), but I want the guy who DIDN'T complain about his injury and won medals on my Wheaties box!

With all the pat answers the athletes are told to produce when asked about their competitors, the I'm-just-happy-to-be-here-and-do-my-best crap that nobody believes, couldn't the PR firms that manhandle the athletes remind them that no one likes a crybaby? Winning with an injury you never speak about is super cool. You're the ubermensch to everyone else's mensch. You giving interviews to anything with a press credential about how much you had to overcome because you competed with split ends? Untermensch.

Personally, I recommend deportation.

It's The Free Market, Stupid

Capitalism is one of those things I take for granted. Having never lived in a non-Capitalist society, I don't much think about it (also, I am no longer 16, and therefore deeply skeptical of Marxists). We can debate the finer points of how capitalism intersects with social policy, but for today, I'm more concerned with business vs. business/business vs. consumer, and not the oh-god-I'm-so-over-it capitalism vs. healthcare vs. socialist-fake-Muslim-presidents.

Over the weekend, while the TV was being used by devoted partner, cutting into my DVRed Olympic schedule, I took some time to answer a push poll sponsored by Cablevision, my utterly useless cable provider. How do I know it was sponsored by Cablevision? Because even neolithic man would have been able to suss out the subtle leading of the questioner. Over the new year, Cablevision caused me great personal distress by discontinuing HGTV. The company that owned HGTV wanted more money, Cablevision didn't want to pay for it, I ended up having free time and no Property Virgins. This matter has since been solved. To my satisfaction as now I have the channel back. Well, while I haven't been paying attention, apparently there's going to be trouble with Cablevision and ABC, who also wants more money for broadcasting rights. In an effort to shore up my support, Cablevision paid some company a lot of money to write and administer a survey guaranteed to raise my hackles and spur me into action against the evil empire of ABC.

Except for the itsy bitsy problem of my being smarter than, say, tree bark.

Question: "Don't you think it's unfair that ABC wants to charge 40 million more dollars for the right to broadcast it's channels on Cablevision?"

Well, that depends. How many Cablevision customers are there? Ok, a quick google tells me 5 million. So ABC wants 8 more dollars from me this year for ABC, ESPN, Disney Channel, and whatever other channels they own that I don't watch anyway. Or 66 cents a month. Hey, that doesn't sound outrageous. Did you think I'd be tripped up by that very large 40 million number?

And wait a second, what's fair? ABC has a product. Cablevision's customers presumably want it (not me, of course, I am merely a cable customer because, when bundled with my phone and internet, it's literally like 10 extra bucks a month to get cable so I can watch Jon Stewart and the Olympics). So if Cablevision wants to continue to purchase a product on behalf of customers who want it, Cablevision will have to pay the asking price. It'd kind of be like my going into the Manolo Blahnik store and asking the salespeople if they don't think it's unfair that a simple pair of leather pumps costs $500. Maybe it is, but that's the price and if I don't like it, I don't buy the product. I only took one econ class in college and cut many of the individual lessons, but I think there's probably a word for this phenomenon.

Question: "Don't you think it's unfair that ABC will use the increase to bailout its failing holdings like Walt Disney World?"

Well, holy poop, you used the loaded word bailout. Since I might be deeply frustrated with the government bailout of Wall Street (sitting here on good 'ol Main Street), I will naturally hate any company that wants to bailout anything. Right? Ooooh, except, again, if ABC wants to use its profits to shore up a failing holding, while I might not agree that it makes good fiscal sense, seeing as I'm not a stockholder, I don't give a pluck. ABC, as an independent company, is pretty well free to use its earnings for whatever it wants, including magic beans. Fair doesn't even enter into it. And even if I was a shareholder, if I didn't like the magic bean buying policy of ABC, I could sell my shares.

Question: "How upset would you be to no longer be able to watch Oprah."

Well, now we've reached the crux of the matter, haven't we? It's not a question of whether or not I'd be upset, it's how upset would I be. Sadly, this is where the survey hit a dead end. While I could talk at length about how I thought ABC had the right to charge whatever it wanted for its goods and services, when it came to wondering about my upset threat levels vis a vis lack of Oprah...well, I'm sure you can imagine. Note: I have never watched an episode of Oprah. When the nice survey-lady asked me how often I watched ABC, I had to remember the last time I DID watch ABC - it wasn't until she reminded me that the Academy Awards are on ABC that I could tell her, yeah, I tuned in last year.

I don't like intellectual laziness, which is what this survey was hoping to capitalize on. The bottom line is that ABC would like 66 cents a month more from each of Cablevision's customers. Cablevision has every right to pass that increase on to me or absorb it at the risk of seeing people switch companies. I then can choose to pay more or choose to make alternate cable arrangements. This is how our system works. I never thought it mattered to me much until I was asked, in no uncertain terms: don't you think it's unfair for companies to charge money for their goods and services and to increase the amount of money as they see fit and as the market will bear?

What the hell have we become? I think it's unfair that money doesn't fall from the sky! I think it's unfair that devoted partner and I have to work to pay for the things we want as opposed to just being given them. I think it's unfair that I PAY FOR CABLEVISION AND IT STILL CAN'T RECORD A SHOW WITHOUT THE DAMN BOX RESTARTING IN THE MIDDLE. ABC raising its prices this year doesn't show up on my top 1000 unfair things.

You Can Pick Your Friends...

Very Eligible
Originally uploaded by reallyct

Now, I'll be the first to admit that in the privacy of my own home, when I think devoted partner isn't looking (and sometimes, sadly, when he is), I do all of the following: nose picking, shower peeing, ingrown hair extracting, audible flatulence. If this lessens your esteem of me, you must not know me. However, I draw what I think is a not at all arbitrary line when it comes to appropriate private behavior and appropriate public behavior, and prolonged nose picking is way way way on the inside of the private line.

I understand that sometimes you need to clear your nasal passageway and are bereft of tissue - in these cases, emergency dispensation may be granted, provided the offender in question makes some nod to propriety.

This man, who looked mostly innocuous and like he a) had a job and b) had sex with humans, spent his entire commute searching for something (obviously very important that he had lost - like his dignity) with his finger in his nose and occasionally in his ear.

While he sat across from me.

I don't know how many times I can say this, but you people totally disgust me! In fact the only thing that keeps me from wishing the whole lot of you to a fiery death is the thought of this.

Ahhhhhhh. There, don't you feel better? I almost can forget Captain Fingerb@ngs His Nose.

But not quite. I am reminded more and more of the SNL skit Eddie Murphy did about putting on whiteface and learning that white people have a whole secret society thing with one another that they hide in the presence of non-white people. It's as though the denizens of Fairfield county have a secret alliance that enables them to behave while on the train (and before it stops at Fordham) as if none of them had ever attended Deerfield. I obviously have a totally skewed view of the world because I always thought that the price on paid to have a lifestyle that enabled one to shop at Brooks Brothers necessarily precluded such anti-social behavior as is in ample photographic display here (oh, and yeah, sorry if you were eating when you clicked on this). I'm surprised there aren't more of them with boomboxes blasting Michael Buble (and/or John Tesh depending on how current you want to be).

I am seriously reconsidering traveling with a spray bottle of water and treating my fellow passengers like misbehaving cats, but then I remember, no cat would be caught dead being as disgusting as this guy.