Movin' on u-uup! To the east side!

Hey y'all, come and see my deeeluxe apartment in the sky. Blogger has been lovely, but I think I'm ready for the wide world of WordPress. And my new site is superfine, for real. Super. Fine.

Go on then, get your pretty little selves over there. White baseball caps are not allowed, so dress chic, por favor. Kiss kiss.

Oh Eva, thank fucking god

My friend Julie called me during the fianale for America's Next Top Model tonight, and together we were SCREAMING and SQUEEING with relief that Eva beat our Fucking Yaya. Yaya! Go back to Brown. Oh Eva, I adore you. So spunky and open. And such gorgeous skin. Oh, to be Eva tonight (or six months ago, or whenever the actual finale of this show took place).

Tonight I had an xmas party for work. We had a "Moroccan Tent" reserved at Mie N Yu in Georgetown. There was free wine, and it was red. Coincidentally, I drink red! Oh ho ho, you don't say, my good man.

Also there were snacks. There were dumplings and coconut shrimp and stinky cheese and meats on a stick. Also little banana custards in teeny frosting cups. Also, you know, free red wine. Open bar! Moroccan tent! Unisex bathrooms!

Also a very drunk General Manager who camped out at the table where my girl friends and I sat and TALKED TALK TALKED for eons about what good work we were doing, there "in the trenches" with the clients, working the long hours, etc etc etc. And, oh yes, what were our names again?

Check please.

I called my dad in the cab on the way home, to say hi. I was all, "Hi Dad! I'm in a cab! A cab that will be expensed! Because I am drunk on the company dime!" He is so proud of all that money he spent on my schooling, for real, you guys. How could he not be? I am fantastic.

I am drunk! Drink drank drunk. And wow, this more than I write some days when I am SOBER. Tomorrow there is another work party too, so I am going to have some water and go to bed. Good night, good night, adios.

A new entry

I am still alive, just lazy.

So I am alone in the office right now as my boss is in Chicago and my coworker is shopping in Georgetown. Yes, seriously. She was all, "I'll be back in a while! Byeeeee!" Oh, to have power at work. What I wouldn't give.

I had a really fun weekend. Friday a friend from high school came over for dinner and a movie. I think when I invited him over for dinner he was expecting me to, like, cook or something. Whatever! I ordered Chinese. I will be such a good wife someday, seriously. We were in the mood for scary movies so I had Session 9, which I don't remember ever coming out in the theatres but a friend told me it was very creepy, and yes, it was.

It was set in an enormous mental institution that had been built in the 1800s and then shut down in the 80s. This team of asbestos removers came to work on it and over the course of a week they start discovering weird things, seeing movements, disappearing, going crazy, etc. Oh holy god, there was one scene where a guy was alone in some dark basement corridor, and at the end of the hall there is a light, and he suddenly sees the shadow of a man step into the hall and start moving towards him. Both the guy in the movie and I screamed simultaneously. The friend I was watching with was unaffected, because he has a heart of tin, or something.

Also, a funny thing happened. Earlier on Friday, my friend Azalea forwarded me an article which said that the old convention center near my apartment was being detonated Saturday the 18th at 7:30 in the morning, and did I want to go see it? Well, that's early, but it sounded cool and it's not something you see every day. We arranged to meet at 7 in the morning the next day. Which was Saturday the 11th. Which I learned at 5-something the next morning, when Azalea, just home from her job checking coats at some club, calls and says: "Dude. We are morons. I just realized it is next Saturday, not tomorrow."

Oh my god, we ARE morons. Morons who cannot read a newspaper or check a calendar.

Saturday afternoon I went to painting class and then at night to a house party with a bunch of friends from high school and from a gallery where I used to work. It was pretty good. We mingled a lot. A lot of the people there were "hipsters." I got caught talking to this one guy who told me about a puppet show he was putting on in his living room the next day, and did I want to come? The best part was when he first mentioned it and he asked me if I had heard of it yet. I'm sorry, it's a puppet show. In your living room. I guess I had missed that news bulletin.

Sunday I met up with my mom and we got facials together, which we do once a season to keep things working correctly. It was lovely and relaxing and splendiferous. We also bought some presents. I also bought some shoes, because I am weak to the power of the DSW and its siren song.

Then we made latkes and soup with my stepfather, and lit the menorah and did presents and all that jazz. I had gotten them gift cards to their favorite stores and they gave me money to put towards school, and also I think my mom bought me some stuff off my Amazon list because she said to keep an eye out for a package soon. Nice! Family bonding, spirit of the season, giving / receiving, tra la la, etc.

Hope everyone else had a good weekend too. Back to the grind.

Ubiquitous Search String Post

Presenting...the weirdest search phrases this site has seen!


old maid gone wild (twice!)
Yes, it is I, that gray-haired lady from the last Girls Gone Wild video.

christy cream
I bet these people are REALLY disappointed when they end up here.

cosi signature salad recipe
Because I write about food a lot, geddit?

"trash chute" + girl
I don't want no proto-serial killers coming around my site!

"by his thighs" - gay
????????

johnny knoxville pants
"peter krause" chest
chris isaak gay
jared leto's boyfriend
kelly mcgillis taller
Maybe I need to quit obsessing over celebrities...

ethipian free gay web sit
This person is a very bad speller. Also, I have no recollection of ever having written an entry about such a thing.

tomato heart killer
In the words of Dave Barry, this would make an excellent name for a rock band.


Ohmygod, that incredible amout of creativity and typing took a lot out of me. I am needing a nap now...
/sarcasm

These are not my people

My office is weird. The people are weird, the set-up is weird, the neighborhood is, yes, weird. Structurally, my company of three people shares office space with our sister company of about ten people. The room I share with my boss, luckily, is one of the only two rooms that has actual windows; the rest of the offices are along a corridor and are tiny and windowless.

This sister company is mainly women, all under thirty-five, and mostly around my age (twenty-five). The only one I am even remotely close to is the adminny girl. She is going to night school for graphics, so we talk about that a lot and we have gone to one art opening and out for one night of drinks together. In almost a year here, this is my closest friend. Which is sad.

In my defense, the other girls are super-girly. Whenever one of them has a birthday, they order in food and invite us, the redheaded step-children of the office, to come and join them in the conference room. But these people are all on Atkins or South Beach diets even though they are built like gardening rakes. So the food sort of sits in the middle of the table, and they will, like, cut a pizza slice in half to share with each other, or pick just the veggies out of the Chinese food cartons, or they will just order salads with Dressing on the Side. Always accompanied by diet cokes (which I am not knocking, but teamed with the non-eating thing, it's a little over the top).

Meanwhile my boss are I are like frat boys. "Pizza! Free pizza? Right on, we are THERE!" And we go tearing down the hall and shovel pizza into our mouths with two hands. Sexy!

(Also, right now there are a ton of chocolates and cookies in the office, and I am the only one who is willing to take one for the team and eat them. Help me, please! They are so good! We have a whole TRAY of those fancy European chocolates with the gold foil wrappers. You know the ones, with the commercial where the attractive European person eats one, accompanied by a deep-throated voiceover, and promptly orgasms. (European people are so easy!))

As another example of the weirdness around here, the sister company's Big Boss Lady brings her two dogs in to work sometimes. I am a dog person, but I cannot condone or approve of these specific dogs. They look like wingless bats. I have no idea what the breed is, but...bats. They are squat, like little bulldogs, and are dark and have squat faces with small triangular ears. And their tongues hang out. They run freely up and down the halls and hang out in peoples' offices.

Now, my boss hates these dogs. I am not sure whether it's because he hates all dogs, or because he has an aversion to bats, but whenever they come in here he hustles them out and shuts our door. They both wear tags, so you can hear them jingling down the corridor towards us, and my boss will say, "Ohhhhh noooo, here they come. They are not coming in here."

Just now one of them came in, stood in the center of the room, and just stared at the boss, panting. He picked up a hackysack he keeps on his desk (I don't know why either) and lightly beaned the dog with it. Seriously, he looked dead into the dog's eyes, tossed the hackysack at it, it bounced off the dog's forehead, and then there was no reaction. Dog just kept staring and panting. We looked at each other and burst out laughing, and then he got up and shooed it out the door in his normal manner.

********************************************************

On another note, I was reading a recap of the Apprentice earlier, and the sidebar of one page has the quote "Personal Grooming Fever -- Catch It!" Is that a shoutout to the title of my blog? I think it is...

Have yourselves a nice little Chanukah

When I left my mom's house after Thanksgiving, she got me to take one of their menorahs and a box of candles with me, to have my own little Chanukah celebrations all week. It is nice. It is the first year since I left home that I will be doing this, so I feel kind of Adult. I remember in college, they had rules in the dorms about no candles/incense/open flame-type-things, but if you were jewish you could submit a special application to the dean or something in order to be able to do your menorah biz. I never did, because I have always hated calling attention to myself.

But now I have the privacy of my own apartment and can light away, starting tonight! For those of you who are in the dark (oh, my sides!) about menorahs, they hold nine candles. One candle is usually set apart from the other eight, and this is the shamus (sp?) which you use to light the main ones. The deal is that, back in the BC years, the jews in what is now Israel were defending themselves against the King's army in order to avoid being converted to Greek Orthodoxy. Eventually, they reclaimed this important synagogue and were hiding out in it. There was only enough lamp oil to keep the synagogue lit for one night, but miraculously the light burned for eight nights, and that is what the eight main candles (which might have a name, but I am no SuperJew so I don't know everything here, people) on the menorah represent.

So for each of the eight nights of Chanukah, you light that many candles, and by the end of the holiday the whole menorah is lit and it is very pretty and fire-riffic. Also you let the candles burn all the way down on their own, so after each night each candle holder is filled with hard wax and you have to scrape it out with a knife before the next round. I am fairly klutzy, so this whole combination of long-burning open flame and chiseling of tiny holder with sharp knife is a dangerous one for me. But I will persevere, because I am a good jew.

One fun part is doing patterns with the candles. Every menorah I have ever seen used the same size candles: these special JewCandles which are very skinny and roped and come Straight From Israel, Ordained by Holy Peoples (or so the box says). When I was little, my mom would always make a game with me of how we would set up the candles each night, in what pattern, because the possibilities are endless! She was partial to alternating blue and white, which are the colors of Israel, but I was a plebian and preferred using one of each color (if memory serves, they are red, blue, white, orange, yellow, and green).

Anyway, I am going home to visit her and my stepdad on Sunday and we will do it up "chosen people-style" with the presents and the latkes (potato pancakes) and the blintzes and matzah ball soup. Wish me luck that I do not burn down my apartment before then and am forced to move back in with them.

Happy Chanukah, everyone! (Also, today is Pearl Harbor Day, but I am not sure what to wish everyone for that. "Safe Pearl Harbor Day," I suppose?)

What I have been doing

Saturday night kicked Friday's ass around the BLOCK, people. I went to this 80s night at a bar and had an awesome (see? 80s) time. First off, the first hour was open bar, so we got our drinking over and done with fast. I don't get drunk (very often) when I go out, and especially if I want to dance, because it just makes me get tired earlier. So I had one bourbon and coke, and then later a tray of free margarita shots were passed around and I had one of those. They were delish and came in shot glasses that have a flashing light at the bottom of them, and no I am not kidding. I stole mine. I mean, it fell into my purse. As did my two friends' glasses (is a miracle of physics and chaos theory). They all kept blinking, in my purse! Astounding!

Then we danced crazily for hours and hours, and it was the best time I have had in a while. I am so glad to have some girlfriends who like dancing too, and don't take themselves too seriously to bust out some moves. I was hanging out with a friend's roommate for a while, and we were talking books and it was great, and then I said I was going to go join my friends and dance, and would he like to come? He was all, no, I'd feel too stupid.

Oh whatever. Nobody's going to spend their night watching and critiquing you. If they do, then they are a jackass. Get over yourself and get out there.

So, I left him discussing books with another guy and found my friends. He did eventually come and join us later, so I guess it was just that old "I need lots of drinks in me before I will look anything other than 'masculine' and 'in control' at all times" chestnut. Yes, I know that one well.

We were there pretty late, until around 2 I think. My one girl friend came home with me and slept on the sofa, as is our custom when we have big nights out. It's nice waking up and getting dressed with her, and then going out for coffee before she goes home. Is like having a short-term roommate.

Now I have spent a good deal of today sending out rejection emails and making rejection calls to people who have applied for a position with my company. My boss gave me free rein to handle all of them however I wanted, so I just emailed the people who we had no interest in and called the ones who got an interview but were then rejected. I hope that is personable/professional enough. I was unemployed and looking for a job for MONTHS after school ended, so I know how horrible it is to get impersonal emails (although it is worse to send your resume off and never hear one damn thing back), but I couldn't bring myself to call everyone. I hate calling people.

I need to leave soon for my first physical therapy session for my sad broken shoulder. Have a good evening everyone!

Message left on my answering machine Friday night by my wacky uncle

"Heyyy there, it's your...long-lost uncle. Eh...in the family manner, we have decided to have a party for our daughter [her two-year birthday party] ...uh...of course it's tomorrow night, so we're giving you like...twenty hours' notice. We're hoping you can come. Your mom! Can come! And your grandma's coming, and a couple of our neighbors...and, that's about it.

"But there'll be lots of festive things and drinking. It starts at 5, and if you can come...please call my mom. Your...oma, or grandma, or whatever you call her, and tell her, cuz maybe you can help with the driving -"

*beep*

"GOD DAMN IT, NICE MACHINE. Jeez, it's like the guy from Swingers, I'll call you like thirty times, and I never can say my phone number. Do you remember that movie? Anyway, call my mom to tell her whether you're coming, and maybe you can...what's it called... drive with them [grandma and her boyfriend].

Anyway, bye bye."

Crikey, this is the gene pool I share.

Plus I think I saw Nicky Hilton

Man, I went to the worst place in DC last night. It was in the GW/Georgetown area, which is bad in and of itself, because once you are out of college who wants to hang out with snot-nosed college kids anymore? I was with some girls I used to work with earlier this year at an art gallery. Another one has gotten a new job too, and it was her idea to go to this Place o' Hell. She was with some coworkers and is really hot for one of them. In the words of the email she sent me, "He is seriously hot and it's been a really long time so I am going to try and jump him tonight." Alrighty then.

It was one of those bars where you pay to get in, and then it is more crowded than Tokyo (so I hear) so you pay to get rid of your coat too. And, oh my god, we could not find this girl (the hot-for-coworker one) for the LONGEST time, and were walking in circles around this ginormous circular bar which looked like Daytona Beach at Spring Break, except that the kids were wearing less clothing than they wear at Daytona.

My friend has long blonde hair and is very tall, so we thought it would be easy to spot her, but HOLY GOD do you know what has happened in the 412 years since I have been at college? ALL COLLEGE GIRLS HAVE TURNED INTO HEIRESSES AND MODELS. Everywhere you looked, blonde blonde blonde, thin and hot and totally polished and no hair out of place. Is college now doubling as America's Next Top Model(tm)? Really, these girls all looked like they have an army of hairstylists and makeup artists at their beck and call, they are so perfectly turned out. When I was in college (in 1912, thankyouverymuch), it was All Study All the Time, except when we would hang out in each others' rooms/apartments and watch Tommy Boy (if you were with guys) or Dirty Dancing (with girls), and the weekends would involve house parties with keg beer in a cup you paid $2 for, or one of the bars "downtown" where you got leered at by some local bikers.

Plus, people were cute, but we weren't going out in clothes we got from BCBG or bebe or anything. Doesn't the whole student stereotype involve having no money and spending your time in seedy locales? Maybe going to college in a big(gish) city is the difference, but it really is odd that a college lifestyle now includes (nay, demands!) professional highlights and enough spare cash for cover charges AND expensive drinks.

Anyway, my point is that Urban College Bars are intimidating. I could have done without a night of being invisible to a zoo of meatheads because I wasn't wearing a tube top and a tiny skirt with my thong showing. And yes, I did find myself frequently thinking "Oh, how could she wear that? It's so cold out tonight." With that, I am officially The Archetypal Mother. Except that I can't cook, so I am useless and need to be put out to pasture. Wow, I am really grumpy and the day has just begun. Bring it on.

I AM the daytime wife, after all...

When I went to see that orthopedist the other week about my shoulder, he gave me these anti-inflammatory pills to take and told me to start going to physical therapy in about two weeks, but not to go if my shoulder still wasn't better. Well, my appointment is almost here but my stupid shoulder is still not better. So I called the doctor up just now and left him a message asking him what I should do next, and when I hung up the phone, my boss, who, as you know, sits ten feet away, goes, "Well that sucks." I said yeah, and I told him a story about how I was reaching for the laundry detergent recently on a shelf in the closet, and when I started pulling it down it was way too heavy for my shoulder and there was a big pain and I had to drop the jug, so I know that things are still far from healed.

He was all, "You might have to quit painting," and I said that I'll just have to start using my left hand or something. So he tells me this big story about some North Carolina basketball dude who was interviewed on national TV about how he managed to play so well after a big game, where he was defending the hoop with either hand, and his answer was: "I don't know. I'm just amphibious!" And apparently that became a really famous quote, especially in North Carolina, where it is still used to this day when someone is trying to explain how they managed to pull something off unexpectedly.

My boss has told me this story before, but I laughed anyway, because I am a nice person. Also because he subsidizes my lifestyle, but that is secondary to my being a nice person. Really!

So anyway, then I was like, "You know, I still have not gone back to the gym. Can you give me a mantra or something?" because he too goes in cycles as far as eating well and exercising, so we frequently bitch to each other about how fat we are getting (although neither of us could be called "fat" by any measure, so really we are just being all junior-high-girly, all "ooh, please tell me I'm not fat," which, yes, is lame).

And he goes, "How 'bout this: I've been working out, so I'm losing weight. So I'm getting hotter and you're not." Well, ouch. And DAMN, this is one good mantra. We both cracked up, and I was like, "Geez, I thought you were going to have to think about it for a while! Have you been waiting to be able to say that?"

He denied it but I know he has. Wily man!

Anyway, then work (work?) fell to the side and we just went off on it.

"You're going to have to hire a hotter assistant, to match you!"
"Yeah! 'Sorry, but you don't fit the company image anymore, so...' "
"Next you will hire two hot assistants, like on Ally McBeal or something!"
"Ha ha ha! Oh, don't worry, there's just more of you to love!"
"I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU JUST SAID THAT."
"Ha ha ha - oh."

Me: [Five minutes later, in a tiny voice] You don't really think I'm getting fat, do you?
Him: [Wishing he had stayed home today] ARGH.

Heh. I am just kidding around, but it's funny to watch him squirm.

I will never sleep again!

Oh man, I had the worst dream last night. I dreamt that I woke up one morning pregnant. And not, like, "oh, I was older and married and we wanted a baby and yay, one morning I woke up and was pregnant!" No, more like "I woke up on a normal, present-day morning and had a HUGE PREGNANT BELLY."

It was petrifying. I was pretty far along (I have no idea what the timelines are for these things), and my stomach was all solid and beach bally, and the next thing I knew I was going to a family party thingy. In real life, if I showed up (unmarried and at my age) pregnant at a family thingy, I am sure I would be disowned and cast aside all Tess-of-the-d'Urbervilles style, but for some reason in my dream all the relatives were totally happy that I was knocked up, and I was the only one remotely freaked out. People kept cooing over me and asking me when I was due, and I was like, "I didn't even know I was pregnant! I just finished my period [sorry, TMI, but relevant to the dream]!" And everyone was completely off their heads and saying things like "That's all right," and "There, there," neither of which have ever been uttered by anyone I am even remotely related to.

ALSO, in my dream it suddenly occurred to me that there was a father involved, and I decided to call him and tell him that I was hugely pregnant, but then I didn't know who he was so I just stared stupidly at my cell phone, and then I realized that I was going to be all alone and pregnant and I started crying.

So it was not a very good dream.

Then I woke up, and you can bet that the very first thing I did was to grab for my stomach. Never have I been happier to feel a non-pregnant fleshy stomach than I was this morning. Ah, sweet insulating flab, you are too good to me.