I Think I Just Shitted On Myself

Maggie's not kidding when she says that Trapped In The Closet is crazy. It's totally bonkers. Imagine the Buffy musical episode, but subtract out any self-awareness and sort of the contextual propriety of the music, and then replace that gay tap-dancing demon with R. Kelly with a real serious look on his big dumb face, and you're getting close. Oh yeah, and make the writing real stupid. A quick run-down for those of you unfamiliar with the material: Trapped In The Closet is a 24+ part R&B opera that's being released in little 4 minute chapters; it's a story of infidelity and betrayal, beginning with R. Kelly's character Sylvester waking up in a woman's bedroom after cheating on his girlfriend with her in a club. The woman, hearing her husband enter the house, hustles Sylvester into a closet to hide. In the story that unfolds, all the characters are cheating on each other in clandestine and surprising ways. The following is an edited (because people on the Internet are fucking illiterate) transcript of my favorite chapter that, I hope, will highlight some of the important themes. To set the stage: Sylvester's girl Gwen has been cheating on him with police officer whom he's discovered earlier in the story and who accidentally shot Sylvester's "cousin," Twan. The police officer has a wife himself, whom he's just found out to be cheating on him -- with a midget, no less.

Now the midget jumps out of the cabinet and stomps the policeman on his toe
The policeman's hoppin' around on one leg, screamin' out "son of a bitch!" while he runs under the table
He yells "freeze," dives over the table, and lands on the midget, while the midget kickin'
Real fast screamin' out "Bridget, Bridget!"
She yells, "Darlin, don't hurt him!"
He says, "Bridget, get yo' ass back,"
Then he continues to rough up the midget as if the midget was under attack
Then Bridget runs up to her room, goes into her purse and pulls a number out
The policeman puts him on the table and yells, "Man, what the hell you doin' in my house?"
He wipes cherry pie crust off his mouth and says, "Man, I was payed not to tell you."
Then the policeman pulls his gun out and yells, "Trespassin', man -- I got the right to shoot you!"
The midget says, "Mister, the man that payed me to do this would kill me if I tell."
He points the gun in his face, the midget says, "God, I think I just shitted on myself!"

There's more, but I want you to wait for it. Props to Maggie and Katie for totally getting me to not be a lonely creep yesterday and the day before -- we went to a Mediterranean restaurant on Tuesday and I totally ate the fuck out of some rosemary-flavored chicken thing and a canoli from Rocco's. Then, yesterday, Maggie and I met Katie at her office in the New York Times building (I'd never been there before -- it's strange and dark and depressing) and went to the Museum of Natural History to see the Darwin show, but, wouldn't you know it, it was a sort of limited admission dealie that was sold out for the hours we were gonna be there. So instead we just kind of wandered around the museum, which I always love. Best of all, the fucking whale was open again -- the last time I'd been there they were "cleaning" it. That's gotta be my favorite thing in the whole collection. I took some pictures, but I'd have to turn on the big computer to upload them, and I don't know... not in the mood. You all know what that looks like, anyway. As Maggie mentioned, I did indeed work up the courage to touch the elephant, but it wasn't no fucking toe I touched. I copped a feel off that motherfucker's flank. We also saw a real live pigeon in the gift shop; racial, so...

After that, we parted ways and I went up to my friend Asta's house for her holiday party. That was fun, kind of, but I've noticed that all my Harvard friends from high school have chosen to be these sort of blissed-out intellectual dilettantes, none of whom has (ever had) a real job, and it makes me kind of uncomfortable about what I've chosen to do, which is to be a cranky working stiff. Asta has this neat little hollowed-out wooden bear that you put incense in, and then you can watch the smoke waft out of its nostrils. I had weird dreams and stomach problems all night, and now it's raining.

Now at Sylvester's house, Twan's got a patch on his shoulder, playin' cards, getting along
They're laughin' and talking when Sylvester says, "Gwen, baby, get the phone,"
Then she walks away from the table picks it up and says hello
Theres a lady on the other line panickin' and cryin' and talkin' all off the wall,
Gwen says, "Wait, slow, slow down -- who am I talkin' to?"
"My name's Bridget and I found your number in my husband's pocket -- I had to call you."
Two minutes later Gwen's shakin' her head sayin', "girl, I understand."
Sylvester says, "Who is it, baby?"
She hangs up and gives him the address

I spent Christmas at my parents' house, and it was really nice and relaxing. Got along great with my sister, which is sort of a rarity. They got me several nice sweaters, but the best present was, well, you guys already know. My dad is really into downloading movies off the Internet these days; like I've been telling people, it's almost as if he'll watch any awful movie out there as long as he can steal it. It kind of runs contrary to the way he normally operates. We watched Minority Report together awkwardly, sitting in chairs in front of his new wide-screen G5 because he "couldn't remember what the movie was about."

I finally met up with Billy to give him his birthday present, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for the Nintendo DS. That little machine is pretty neat -- the game that comes with it, WarioWare, is a total blast. It's an endless supply of these tiny little mini-games that practically never repeat and that you have about 5 seconds to figure out and win each round. I bet the multiplayer version on the Gamecube is utterly delightful. We sat around and ate oranges and chocolates and then I went back to Brooklyn.

Now, meanwhile, back at the policeman's house, the midget's cryin' his ass off
While he's lyin' through his teeth about to get his li'l ass told off,
Then Bridget busts into the kitchen with a double barrel, sayin', "James, I can't let you do this"
Then he looks at her and says, "What? You'd shoot me for this fuckin' midget?"
She says, "I love him!"
The midget says, "No, Bridget!"
And then James points his gun and says, "We all gon' die up in this kitchen"
Now Bridget and James starin' each other down, slowly backin' apart
Then the midget takes his inhaler out and says, "This is not good for my heart"
Then James says, "Bridget, don't make me do this, baby put the gun down"
That's when Sylvester and Twan busted up in the house and say, "You put the gun down!"
Twan and Sylvester are sniffin' around trying to figure out what's that smell
As they turn and look at each other like, "What the hell?"

The smell is the shit in the midget's pants.

A Strange Encounter

Today seems to be going absurdly nice, weather-wise, so I went out for a run around the park. I haven't been running consistently since it's gotten colder, so I did have to stop twice and walk a tiny little bit -- though on the whole I think I rocked the loop pretty hard. But one of the walking parts was the initial slope of that hill that Tom and Emma can identify as The Widowmaker, and as I was psyching myself up to start running again, this strange rumpled little old guy in a button-up shirt and a leather hat who looked like he could've been one of the engineers on the Manhattan Project came up to me and started talking:

"You... American?"

"Yes."

"You American citizen? You born this country?"

"Yes..."

"You human... humanity? Or technical?"

"Uh... technical."

"What type technical?"

"Computers."

"Computer is technical? Hmmm... Like what computer -- programming or hardware?"

"Programming."

"Maybe you could tell me question, okay? Let's say you are engineer... science... scientist, and you have proposal for new [unintelligible], and you send to company, institution, you know, and they [unintelligible], you know, give you the brush-off."

"What's the problem?"

"They give you the brush-off."

"Well, you could submit your proposal to a different organization."

"I submit already to multiple company."

"Or you could publish it yourself."

"Publish it... no... I need verification from expert."

At this point he let me go, and warned me to be careful running in the cold -- advise I could have used, perhaps, earlier in the week. "Good luck," I said. Now I'm going over to my parents' house to help them do holiday things and hopefully give Razor his birthday present. Send me e-mails!

Tuffy Tuffins Sings The Blues

Last night I went out for dinner and drinks with my old friend Eve, who I'd stood up the night before when I got stuck in Manhattan. I had a bunch of errands to do on the way, so I gave myself an extra long time to get there, like an hour and a half, and then, wouldn't you know it, I got to our appointed meeting place with an hour to kill in the freezing cold. If I'd had a cell phone, I guess I could've called her house and come over or had her meet me, but I don't have one for another few days at least, so. So I tried to think of what one of my cool friends would do were he/she in a situation like this, and the answer is "go to a bar and have a drink and maybe meet a pretty girl while you are sitting by yourself at the bar." So I walked up and down Smith St. for a while peeking in the windows of all the bars and trying muster up the courage to be the only person in an empty bar or the only single person in a bar crowded with corporate happy-hour revelers. And I couldn't do it, which was humiliating and depressing, so I ducked into the Cafe St. Clair, as recommended by T. Rounsaville, and had the loneliest cup of hot chocolate ever, feeling like the most pathetic and small creature ever to spend Christmas by himself. And after that I was still 30 minutes early, so I wandered in and out of some of the trendy little boutiques on Smith. I found this one place selling little house and home trinkets, and in one corner of the store they had this bucket of old comic books from the 70s, some of which must have been at least a little valuable, and which included such titles as Kull The Destroyer and Devil Dinosaur. Then I read the Voice for a while on the street. Here's some more of my dealings with tuffytuffins:

(23:25:03) tuffytuffins: Did you miss me?
(23:55:26) Nintendo Julian: Who... who are you?
(23:55:32) tuffytuffins: You did. Didn't you?
(23:56:21) tuffytuffins: It's OK. I missed you too.
(23:57:44) tuffytuffins: Are you there? Please don't ignore me!
(23:57:50) Nintendo Julian: Look.
(23:57:54) Nintendo Julian: What... what's the deal?
(23:57:55) tuffytuffins: I think I am in love with you.
(23:58:03) Nintendo Julian: Alright, that's enough.
(23:58:09) tuffytuffins: Why are you toying with my emotions?

Then Eve showed up and we went to this great Peruvian restaurant with a menu distinctly similar to the venerable Coco Roco's. We ordered a plate of ceviche to start with, which I'd never had before and which was absolutely delicious. My spirits picked up after I got some food in me and warmed up (the cold can really put a damper on brain function), and we chatted about life and love and how awful things can seem sometimes. Then we hoofed it over to Angry Wades and had some drinks and managed, by increments, to secure the seat next to the fireplace again, though we had to share it with one of the off-shift bartenders who was reading a Robert Jordan novel, of all things. He revealed that the fireplace is, in fact, not real -- it burns natural gas and the logs are all ceramic. Which doesn't make it any less cozy. After that we took a walk over to the Gowanus Canal and watched the moon for a while, which is when we noticed a train going by over the elevated tracks around Smith and 9th, which clued us in that the strike was, in fact, completely over. And then I went home.

(00:11:46) tuffytuffins: Well I guess we can only be friends.
(00:12:01) Nintendo Julian: If that. Who are you?
(00:12:11) tuffytuffins: I'm your new friend.
(00:12:29) Nintendo Julian: Alright, I think I've had enough of you.
(00:12:34) tuffytuffins: Why?
(00:12:41) Nintendo Julian: I want to know who you are.
(00:12:47) tuffytuffins: You want my name? Why do we need labels?
(00:12:55) Nintendo Julian: Because this is creepy is why.
(00:13:06) tuffytuffins: What is creepy?
(00:13:11) tuffytuffins: Friendship?

So what are we all doing for Christmas? Some of you are away, I know, but I have presents for practically all of you, and wouldn't it be nice if we all sort of sat down and did the presents thing in one shot? Everyone's going to that New Year's Eve party, right? What if we all showed up a little early to that and traded gifts before the party really got underway. I'm just saying. And I totally want to do the whole Jew holiday thing the week of the 26th; we can do it at my place or yours.

(00:13:13) Nintendo Julian: Where did you get my name?
(00:13:40) tuffytuffins: I searched for people who like Nintendo.
(00:13:47) tuffytuffins: I like Duck Hunt.
(00:13:57) Nintendo Julian: Alright.
(00:14:10) tuffytuffins: Then you were very nice.
(00:14:17) tuffytuffins: And that's when I fell in love with you.
(00:14:19) Nintendo Julian: I'm going to block you.
(00:14:34) tuffytuffins: No friendship?

The kicker is that I wasn't actually able to block her using my weird Linux AIM client, so she's still out there somewhere, waiting. I'm still sort of hoping this is someone I know in disguise, in which case the joke's on me but which will also mean I won't have had a totally creepy exchange with a female version of the main character from Notes From Underground.

The Big Vacation, Day Four

Billy cancelled his party on account of the transit strike, which sucks. I was kind of counting on having something to do, but can see why he'd wanna put it off. Now, as per Katharine's advice, I'm doing the vacation thing -- I bought some Doritos and a pint of Ben & Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream (as far as I can tell, no flavor is better than this) and I'm chilling out watching David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, which, sad to say, is not quite as creepy as I'd hoped. There is, however, a pretty hot sex scene involving rubber tubing and various types of calipers in the gynecologist's office. Okay, I finished watching the movie -- depression-city, and not quite the body-horror diddle-fest I was hoping for. Turns out it's based on a real set of gynecologist twins named Steven and Cyril Marcus who totally went bananas and killed themselves with barbituates.

Here's an interesting thing: The saga of tuffytuffins. The other day I got an IM from somebody I'd never heard of before, but whose screen name I kind of thought I recognized on account of it reminding me of this joke that Tom and Maggie used to use to "wind me up" -- so I sort of played along, thinking that the person would eventually reveal themselves to one of my friends (or one of their friends). That's not quite what happened (edited for the salient points):

(23:13:16) tuffytuffins: Hello.
(23:14:24) Nintendo Julian: hello

(23:14:52) tuffytuffins: Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?
(23:15:25) Nintendo Julian: is that the same thing as...
(23:15:27) Nintendo Julian: ...no
(23:16:04) tuffytuffins: Well, I have.
(23:16:21) Nintendo Julian: how was that
(23:16:32) Nintendo Julian: you find out what you need to find out about yourself?
(23:16:33) tuffytuffins: He looked like the blond guy from Queer Eye
(23:17:06) tuffytuffins: Is that what I was supposed to be doing? Finding out about myself? Because I was just kind of dancing.

Ted and I saw King Kong last night after finishing up our Christmas shopping. The theater -- and Times Square -- was practically deserted, or at least as empty as I'd ever seen it except maybe for that dumb movie Vanilla Sky. It took me more than two hours to get into Manhattan, thanks to the strike -- I was worried that by staying at home I was missing out on the official "transit strike" experience, but no longer. The transit strike experience is basically all about sitting in traffic for two hours. So I was late meeting Ted, but he was gracious in his irritation. We went shopping at the Virgin Mega-store, which, did you know, has this weird little movie theater in the basement that plays strange foreign short films? We didn't see any of them. I bought a present for The Rase and Ted picked up some stuff for his family, and then we went to go see King Kong at the big AMC 25-screen theater around the corner, stuffing some contraband McDonalds hamburgers into Ted's messenger bag before going in.

The theater was practically empty, which seemed to give the impression to the two latin types sitting next to me that it was totally cool to talk the whole time, literally. Also, there was a real live homeless person sleeping across the three seats behind us, and during the opening credits he kept sort of wheezing and snuffling, which made me think, before I turned around and realized he was a homelo, that it was some funny person making monkey noises for a laugh. The movie was okay -- Andy Serkis did a great job with the monkey poses and facial expressions, but Jack Black... he's no Laurence Olivier. And the whole thing is 90 minutes too long. And what the fuck does it mean?

(23:20:09) tuffytuffins: Do you believe stuffed animals can be art?
(23:20:48) Nintendo Julian: Yes, of course. Case in point: The beanie-baby named Pinchers The Crab
(23:21:07) tuffytuffins: Exactly my point. Beanie Babies were my inspiration.
(23:21:15) tuffytuffins: That's what I do. I create stuffed animals
(23:21:24) Nintendo Julian: Out of what do you create them>
(23:22:21) tuffytuffins: Whatever materials are laying around. Maybe orange peels for stuffing. Maybe old underwear for lining. Once, I used cat hair.
(23:22:52) Nintendo Julian: Because, you know, whatever.
(23:23:05) Nintendo Julian: The orange peels keep the stuffed animal "moist" inside
(23:23:19) tuffytuffins: You have to give them souls. Otherwise they won't be art. Then they're just stuffed animals.
(23:23:31) Nintendo Julian: And the souls have to be gross is the other thing.

The cabbie for the ride home I shared with Ted was real talkative. After Ted got out of the cab, he asked me where I was from. I told him I grew up on the Bowery, and he said I had a strange accent, one that he couldn't place. "You go to school in California or something?" he asked. Then he asked what I do for a living, and when I told him I'm a programmer, he said, "I got a thing I want to sell on eBay -- I collect stamps, and I got $500,000 worth of stamps, you know from like 100 years ago, in an album at home. You could help me sell that?" That sounds like a lot of money, I said. I don't now if I can help you with that -- maybe you should go to eBay's web site and talk to one of the staff. "No, no, where do you live? I live in Williamsburg -- you could come to my house on Sunday and help me take a picture of the stamps and make a web site?"

(23:29:14) tuffytuffins: Would you like to subscribe to any magazines?
(23:29:21) tuffytuffins: I can get you a discount.
(23:29:42) Nintendo Julian: Which is your least popular magazine? I like to go my own way.
(23:30:17) tuffytuffins: People don't like the gardening ones. Do you have a "green thumb?"
(23:31:11) tuffytuffins: I also sell porn.
(23:31:19) Nintendo Julian: No thanks, Internet person.
(23:31:21) Nintendo Julian: None of that for me.
(23:31:31) tuffytuffins: There's lots to choose from.
(23:32:03) tuffytuffins: Do you want to know our least popular porn?
(23:32:21) tuffytuffins: Hold on. I'm checking
(23:32:56) tuffytuffins: Not child porn. That's pretty popular.
(23:33:11) tuffytuffins: Not midget porn. That gets a good college student following.
(23:34:00) Nintendo Julian: That's one of the roots of townie-student strife; a college moves into town and pretty soon the place is stinking with drifts of dead, naked midgets.
(23:34:14) tuffytuffins: Oh, the worst-selling category is "Tragedy Porn." Like sex in the aftermath of hurricanes and things.
(23:34:28) Nintendo Julian: I'd imagine most of that sex is pretty great, though.
(23:34:37) Nintendo Julian: Maybe it's the kind of thing that doesn't photograph well

So who is this person? She's got a sense of humor, I'll grant you, but boy does she not want to say who she is. I'll put the rest of our conversation into a separate entry. The transit strike is over!

The Big Vacation, Day One

Last night, Chrissy Rodney came back to the East Coast from UCLA and I hung out with him and Razor (and Razor's girl, SJ) at Razor's apartment. I didn't know this, but their Australian Shepherd dog Fry had gotten hit by a car around Thanksgiving and died! That's terrible. But they have a new dog now, Job (named for the Arrested Development character, but not spelled like that for some reason), which is some kind of Huskie-mix thing, that is absolutely adorable: It rolls around on its little mat with its legs in the air like a cat and gives kisses a'plenty. We drank lots of beers and I ate a double cheeseburger that they had in the fridge. My appetite has been absolutely zero for the past couple of days. Maybe I've got what Ted's recovering from. Tomorrow is Billy's birthday. I know what I'm getting him as a b-day present, but not as a Christmas present. Maybe he just won't get one -- it's the curse of the Saggitarius.

So I'm on vacation now for two weeks. Don't really know what I'm gonna do with myself -- I went running in the early afternoon, which was pretty unpleasant, given the temperature and the fact that I haven't run in a couple of months. I had to walk, I think, most of the way. The rest of the day I spent working on little projects, but that's not going to hold me over for two weeks. Literally e-mail me and tell me which of you are here and not at work. Want to see "Kong?"

I rented American Pie, which, believe it or not, I'd never seen. I actually thought it was pretty great -- the actors all have a sort of refreshingly gross look to them, and their delivery is often novel, if not always natural. Observations:

• Is it just me or is Chris Klein's character actually a pretty awful singer? It seems like 'Oz' rises to the top echelon of the jazz singing club pretty quickly given that he can't really hit the right notes all the time
• What's up with everyone cheering on Jason Biggs while he's doing that strip tease on the webcam? I feel like I'd be more inclined not to want to see this guy in my trig class take all his clothes off. Not that it's gay, it's just, you know, not good porno. Also, what's the deal with there being no narrative retribution for him putting that girl all over the Internet? I mean, I guess he has his own humiliation televised as well -- I will say that I've never really understood the little problem he has in that scene. That's probably the one awful sex thing that's never happened to me.
• Favorite character by far: Shit-Break. It's time the movies had a hero who looks a little bit less like Chris Klein and more like a fresh corpse that's just entered the "bloat" stage of decomposition
• How creepy is Natasha Lyonne? I could've called that Hepatitis thing if I'd seen this movie when it came out

I was going through some of my old journals this evening trying to collate some of my more continuous threads of writing to use towards a more cohesive long-form thing, and I was struck by how weird I've always been -- or at least, how weird I was even back then -- and how I still kind of worry about the same irrational things and characterize things to myself in the same ways. It sort of freaked me out, but it was not a wasted errand, since I got several pages of good material that I think I can expand upon.

The Rase was wondering what the actual meaning of the word crapulence was, since she often references that line from the Who-Shot-Mr.-Burns Simpsons episode ("wallowing in my own crapulence"). I do that do, but I didn't know what it meant, either, so we looked it up:

crap·u·lence (krpy-lns)
n.

1. 1. Sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking.
2. 2. Excessive indulgence; intemperance.

So, literally, it means "crapulence."

It never fails to surprise me how alcohol can make you feel pretty okay no matter how awful you're feeling.

UPDATE: COCKBLOCKERS

Single White Shemale

[11:36] Me: so I leered at her tits all night
[11:36] Tom: That doesn't sound like you.
[11:36] Tom: It must've been really liberating to finally do something "creepy."

I'm writing this at work. In other words, the strike did not go down -- they're going to "phase it in," starting with the private bus companies in the outer boroughs. My commute was a disaster, though, because of a "very sick passenger" at 4th Ave., one stop away from my house. They stopped the train for like 20 minutes in the tunnel, and then announced, loudly and repeatedly, that if we didn't want to wait any longer, we could walk to the front of the train and exit up there. So I stayed on board, because, you know, fuck it. Then a little while later they said that we all actually had to get off because the train was going out of service. So I queued up with everyone else and eventually made it to the middle of the train, at which point the conductor came on again and told us all to sit down because we were actually going to start moving again. The whole thing took about 45 minutes, no lie. The worst part was that I was sitting right near this revolting old I-Ti / Hispanic lady who would not shut up talking, apropos of nothing, to these two Muslim girls sitting right next to me whom she'd just met. I guess there's some reading of second-and-third-world culture in which complainy old women are sort of exercising some kind of powerful social force with the yakking and the clucking and the whining, but come on, people. The highlights:

• "He got so bad, with the gangrene, that he was rolling around in the car. Some people might say in that situation that death is better than living, but not me. Because when someone dies you lose something 'dat you love, right?"
• "They do the fistula surgery on her, and two weeks later, she's back driving the emergency truck, you know, to rescue people what needs help. It's not fair; there's no recovery time. And now the doctors're tellin' her there's another fistula."
• "At first, I thought it was funny, my niece, with the lipstick, but this morning I woke up and there's lipstick all over the walls! My niece, she so cute, you know that she loves her mama because anyone else tries to talk to her, she be screamin', screamin', and she don't never stop."

Okay, so these don't sound too funny in retrospect, but just imagine these two nervous Muslim girls covered up in their weird little insane-person headdresses nervously spinning the wheels on their iPods and praying that this woman with her wheedling, whiny voice will just STFU.

But I finally got in (at around 11:00) and stopped off at Han's to get a delicious breakfast sandwich: Egg, provolone, tomato, and bacon, on whole wheat toast. I recommend you give it a spin the next time you're eatin'.

Strikethrough

Haven't blogged in forever, and I'm only blogging now because I don't feel like working on my computer projects. Is there gonna be a transit strike tomorrow? It sure looks that way. And thus I stand to lose two dollars to Tom -- I made two bets, and I've already lost out on one in that Tower Video did let us come in and browse around with our Tall Chai Lattes. The times they are a-changin'. My job has a "contigency plan" in place so that we'll all be able to work from home, but you know what that amounts to? SNOW DAY! For those who aren't blessed to live in New York, the Metropolitan Transit Authority is one of the most grotesquely mismanaged bureaucracies in... well, in New York City; on the other hand, the strike we're looking at is basically going to cripple the city. I mean, literally, there will be no public transportation tomorrow, and everybody rides public transportation here. So. And then the next two weeks I have off. Anyone wanna take me on a trip with you? I'm rich and I love "fun."

I finished Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and while it was beautiful in many ways, I still have the same complaint about it that I did at the outset -- that is, that the narrator is so goddamn affectless and, I don't know, fucking blase that it totally spoils the impact of you know, the cosmic horror. I think their design problems began when they named the guy "Jack Walters." Clearly he's gonna be a boring guy. And, I mean, you'd think he'd have a bit more of an internal monologue having been diagnosed as an "acute schizophrenic"

I bought Christmas presents for practically all of my friends this year, which is pretty rare for me, Fagin. Got a lot of the shit on eBay, and I actually ran into a bit of a sticky situation -- I bid on an auction before looking at the seller's feedback rating, and when a conscientious eBay user notified me, it turned out the seller's rating was 0 -- equal positive and negative feedback, which is extremely rare for eBay, which is basically a big cuddle-fest around the clock. Well, I read up on the rules on bid retraction, and it turned out I didn't have much recourse except to watch in terror as the seller's rating dropped to -2 and I got two more e-mails from other eBay members claiming to have been "scammed" by the seller. Well, the auction ended, and I won the item, but by the grace of the eBay fraud prevention team, the seller's account was suspended, releasing me from the contract I'd entered when I placed the bid. The seller responded a few days later to the panicky e-mails I'd sent her with an e-mail that includes the following excerpt (sic):

I know that this is a inconvience to you, but imagine my situation, I am having to close down all my checkings and savings accounts even the accounts I have for my boys college funds even though they have just been started due to they are only 2 and 4, but it pays to start early on things like this for the kids now a days with the economy and the world in the shape that it is in... I am sending the item out that day, that is if it is before 12:00, because at noon is when we take the packages up,. the boys lay down for their nap and we have my niece to babysit them while we run to the post office

Well, cry me a river, sister.

Congratulations to Tom on getting a line in on the episode of The Colbert Report introducing Bob Costas! Really... really proud of you, I guess.

So who wants to see King Kong with me? Who wants to see The Gay Cowboy Movie with me? Merry Christmas!

Wreckin' Booty Socks

OMGSNOW! I woke up to this scraping sound outside my window, and I was picturing this little kid dragging a two-by-four behind him up and down the sidewalk behind him. I was all ready to open the window and holler at him, but then I opened the window, and, you know. There it all was. Can't wait to go outside and walk around in it, maybe do some shopping, maybe just have a look around.

Sophie made some Indian dish last night that involved coating every surface in the kitchen golden with turmeric. When she was hosing it off with fantastik this morning, we made a fascinating discovery -- fantastik turns turmeric a deep chartreuse color -- something like grapefruit juice, or Emma's Furby: Our Lord The Flayed One.

So the message that girl left about her iPod the other night turned out to be a lot crazier than I'd thought when I was listening to it be recorded. She says something like (I deleted the actual message in a fit of annoyance): "Hi, this is Sam, I took your bag last night, and you took my bag... you took my iPod. Please give me a call, my number is..." Wha? The second message was (I think) from her boyfriend and sounded a lot more... conciliatory, I guess. He says something like, "Hey, uh, my name's Dan, and, uh, I think you might have left that bar last night with my iPod? If you don't mind, could you give me a call? My number is..." Clearly trying to strike a balance between appeasing his histrionic Jew girlfriend and trying to come off like a normal person. So I left her a voicemail wherein I delicately suggest that I know fucking nothing about her stupid iPod.

Two funny dreams: Friday night I dreamed Ted was taking us all to Ikea, and we bought a bookcase or shelves or something that required both screws and wood glue to put together. On the way back in the car, I was fiddling with the packaging for this furniture, and, without thinking, I opened the little tube of glue and squeezed a bunch of it into my mouth and swallowed it. In the dream it had this sort of sugary orange taste, a little like the filling of those little hard candies that come in the white wrapper with a picture of a piece of fruit on it. Anyway, though, once I realized what I'd done I started rifling through the instruction manual that came with the stuff and found an ingredients list for the glue that had a bunch of complicated-sounding chemicals on it and an ominous message like, "Toxic if swallowed." I asked Ted to drop me off at the emergency room, but he said, "No, you'll probably be fine." Last night, I dreamed that Tom (I think) was on a date with this girl who really wanted to go to this one particular restaurant -- in fact, he said she'd be crushed if they couldn't go there -- but it just so happened that said restaurant was closed the evening they were going out. So he enlists me along with the security guard who's patroling the restaurant to open the place up and act as waiters for him and this girl. And we do, but she wants to order a bunch of stuff that we have no idea how to cook. So we have to run out to a bunch of stores / other restaurants to round up the components of the meal. What a riot!

On Sunday The Rase and I and one of her co-workers went to that RUSSIA! show at the Guggenheim. I hadn't been up to that neighborhood in eons, and I'd forgotten how much I like just walking around up there around all those nice old buildings and mean old white folks. The show was pretty interesting -- I tried to pay attention to the historical aspects of the pieces, because that's, you know, how grown-ups look at art, I think. According to the accompanying information, Russian painting in the 15th and 16th centuries was mostly stylized religious iconography (which was actually pretty sweet, especially the wall-hangings made out of silver and gold thread) and then, by a combination of wars and varying travel restrictions / incentives, Russian painters were exposed to a more naturalistic composition in use by Western painters. Notably, all the important artistic reforms were top-down (i.e., coming directly or indirectly by edict of the tsar) -- the exhibit even described the "revolution" in portrait-painting that introduced the use of middle-class subjects as being a result of Alexander II's liberation of the serfs. I think my favorite painting was that famous one of the barge-haulers, because, man, those guys really look like they wanna rape something, but Sophie and I both discovered this other guy that we both liked, a landscape painter named Arkhip Kuindzhi. I also found a little machine in one of the corners of the floors that looked kind of like a cross between a seismograph and food processor, apparently measuring some important thing going on in the museum. That was almost as good as the paintings. Unfortunately, the museum closed before we got to the top of the spiral, so we only got to see until about the beginning of the 20th century. Lotta homeless people on the train.

After that, Sophie wanted to stop off at this fair-trade goods expo that some of her friends were participating in over at a private party in TriBeCa, so we went to that and homphed down like a million little hors'doeuvres sandwiches.

Fight The Future

Ahoy-hoy! Look what I found -- Comedy Central, weeks later, finally decided to put up the clip of Bring 'Em Back / Leave 'Em Dead: Asian Edition from the taping of the Colbert Report that I went to. So after many arduous attempts at screenshot-taking (Windows or DirectX has this video feature called "overlays" which, while enabled, makes it virtually impossible to grab a frame of video -- also makes it so that every pixel of a particular color on the screen becomes transparent down to the window containing the overlayed video; kind of bush-league if you ask me), I present you with the following:

As noted earlier, Tom and Ted are visible (in the first row on the right-hand side), but I am, unfortunately, just off-camera. Boy, Tom looks mad. The question put to us was about the 1980s band Asia: "Leave 'em dead!"

The Sarah Silverman movie was good, but it didn't, you know, give you any kind of insight into what she thinks about anything; it was basically just an hour and a half of pretty good stand-up. My favorite bit was probably the one she did at the beginning about de-boning Ethiopian babies to get at the precious "jewels" in their tailbones. "They have to... de-bone the babies," she said. She is cute as all get-out, I tell you. Hard to believe that she's going out with Jimmy Kimmel.

One of The Rase's friends got us SRO tickets to Sweeney Todd last weekend, which was, I hear, "so exciting that it is almost unbearable" for the theater critic from some New York paper. I don't know if I'd go that far, but it was pretty great as far as musicals go -- neat staging, good singing, etc., and the cast doubled as the orchestra, which was novel if not explicable. And this musical is probably the most operatic and least... catchy of all of Sondheim, in my limited experience. Here's the thing, though -- I find it harder, as time goes on, not to find musical theater anything but grotesque, in a way that regular theater isn't. Is that weird? It's just so hard to get over the idea that breaking into song is anything but ridiculous. Also, there was a little inset in the Playbill from the Broadway Cares AIDS charity that segued into asking for money by claiming that the chorus' demand that we "attend the tale of Sweeney Todd" is some kind of acknowledgment of the common tie that binds us all through triumph and tragedy, etc., etc. I'm pretty sure that's not what it means, but, you know, what do I know?

On Thursday I finished the nth-hundredth test case for this little software package I'm working on and put together a release, which made me feel pretty good. And then five minutes later I got back to thinking about how much more work there is to be done.

Last night I went out with Tom and Ted and The Rase to Great Lakes (after cramming in a gross burger at Bonnie's Grill), and when we got up to leave, I couldn't find my backpack. I'd probably have just written it off as lousy luck, but Tom insisted that we search the area, and we ended up finding a bag that nobody near our table would lay claim to and that was identical to mine except that it had a whole bunch of different stuff in it (laptop, wallet, etc.). So I wrote a note explaining that we thought someone had grabbed mine by mistake -- and it would have had to have been a pretty big mistake, considering that all mine had in it was my skinny little journal of "important thoughts" and a paperback copy of Phineas Finn -- and gave the other person's backpack to the bartender. Sure enough, about an hour after I got home I got a call from the owner of the backpack confirming the switcheroo and that she'd dropped mine off at the bar. Luckily Tom was still there and brought mine back to his house. But the story doesn't end there: I got a couple of phone calls this morning (that I let the machine handle) at like 5:00 AM from this unlucky girl who was wondering whether I'd accidentally taken the iPod out of her bag. Pretty sure I didn't, and pretty sure it was still in her bag when I gave it to the bartender, so... good luck with all that. We'll see what happens.

I'm shopping online for Christmas presents.