out of context

Would that it were?(!)

I watched John Kerry's performance on the Daily Show last night.

If I were grading him, I'd give him a B-.

He certainly did not bomb the interview, but he also did not hit it out of the park. He generally laughed along with all of Jon Stewart's set-ups, and didn't make too much of a fool of himself. After all, we did learn that the most bizarre part of campaigning is that people introduce themselves to you in the men's room, which leaves all of us with the unpleasant image of Kerry at a urinal...(perhaps at a waterfree urinal?)

Kerry's biggest blunder came at the end of the interview, when Stewart asked if his wife earned a nickle for every bottle of ketchup we buy. Kerry laughed and responded "would that it were, would that it were...but buy the ketchup anyway."

Would that it were?(!!!) Who says that? Is this guy for real?

For a complete transcript, you can check out Wonkette's coverage.

Howard Kurtz gives him fairly good marks, as did WaPo's Lisa deMoraes. USA Today also gives him a fair review, so I guess we're in the clear.

But honestly, John. Next time you're on a late-night comedy program that appeals to a young audience in the hopes of painting yourself as a regular guy, with a sympathetic and talented host throwing you curve ball questions to make you look good and funny, for the love of God, DO NOT USE STUFFY PHRASES LIKE 'WOULD THAT IT WERE' (especially when referencing your wife's millions).

Chasing pigeons

Yesterday I had lunch with my boss Steve at Tudor City Park, which is between 41st and 43rd streets on 1st Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. You can see a picture of the park here: http://www.laurasnyctales.com/tudor-city/park1.html

We sat on a bench in this urban sanctuary, among a sizeable lunchtime crowd of New Yorkers taking a moment to relax and quietly collect their thoughts. Steve ate his prepared chicken sandwhich while I ate my chicken ceasar salad.

At one point, Steve pointed out to me a boisterous little boy, probably only 3 years old, who was accompanying his mother at the park. As she sat nearby, he ran around one of the parks' gardens chasing pigeons. Steve wondered aloud about what the boy would do when he actually caught a pigeon. Taking on the voice of a little boy, Steve read his thoughts: "I don't know why I want you, but I'm after you, pigeons."

I commented then to Steve how we are all a little like that boy, foolishly chasing after our own pigeons, not knowing why we're chasing them nor what we'll do when we catch them.

As I spoke these words, a profound revelations dawned on Steve and I at the same time: I'm full of bullshit.

9 lives

The smell was mildly unpleasant at first.

I used to live in the basement of a house in The AQ (my hip term for Astoria, Queens). Right off of my living room was the laundry room, which was shared by the rest of my house (a random Craigslist-assortment of 20-somethings who were holding down side jobs in retail, restaraunts, temp agencies or in overnight call center for car services while they auditioned for parts in shows, cruise ships, children performances and operas).

Several months ago, I noticed a perculiar smell in the laundry room. My first thought was that it was a dead mouse or rat, but we didn’t have any traps, and after searching around the room, I couldn’t find any evidence of one. By keeping the door closed, I was able to contain the smell to the laundry room. Since it didn’t affect my living area, I chose to ignore it. When the smell did not get progressively worse, I reasoned that it must not have been a dead animal after all, but rather caused by some other sort of funky problem.

A couple of weeks went by.

While doing several loads of laundry about a month after initially noticing the smell, I realized that the smell was still present. Thinking that maybe all that was needed was for the room to be aired out, I opened up the small sunken window near the ceiling in the laundry room that led up to our backyard patio. When I opened the winow, I was hit by a tidal way of putrid smell. Because of the angle, I couldn't get a good look at what was on the other side of the window, so I decided to run upstairs and get a view down from the patio. I grabbed a flashlight and shinned the beam down about two feet from the surface of the patio to the window.

I gasped as I shown the light on the body of a weeks-old decomposing cat. (Feel free to insert your favorite dead cat joke here – some sort of variation on nine lives, always landing on their feet, the feline’s decline, all dogs go to heaven, stinky pussy – you get the idea).

I quickly went back downstairs to close the still-open window, as there were flies attending to the dead kitty. Heading into the laundry room, there were at least a dozen large flies swarming about, dive-bombing into me. The smell had escalated by this point to an unbearable stench. I managed to get the window closed and quickly got out. After calling 311, I learned that the city doesn’t deal with dead animals on private property, so I enlisted my roommate Teresa to help me clean up the mess. Her contribution consisted mostly of shinning the flashlight in the general vicinity of the window well, without actually shinning it onto the task at hand.

I first tried using a shovel, but the angle was awkward and I couldn’t really get the little bugger scooped up. So with the collar of my tee shirt guarding my nose, I grabbed two garden stakes from my old roommate’s failed attempt at growing tomatoes last fall and began trying to pick out of the body of the dead cat. While I pride myself at being proficient with using chopsticks, grasping General Tsao’s Chicken with eight-inch chopsticks sadly does not adequately prepare one for plucking a decomposing cat out of a sunken window well with 6 foot garden stakes. The effort proved more grotesque than I had bargained for; the smell was nauseating, the flies reminded me of the Oz’s flying monkeys on the attack, and I couldn’t get around the fact that I was dealing with the stubborn body of a dead cat.

After several minutes of intense pricking and prodding, I managed to hoist the body up onto the surface of the patio, and Teresa bravely held open a trash bag while I scooped it in. I then made another pass of the window well with the flashlight, and sure enough, there was another huge chunk that hadn’t made the trip up. I went back down and managed to pluck up the rest of the remains. We then triple bagged the corpse, labeled it clearly “DEAD CAT”, (as per instructions from 311), and set it out on the curb with the rest of the trash. Luckily the next day was a trash day.

Now, while I definitely like to imbibe alcohol from time to time, I generally do not feel the urgent need for a drink at any extreme time – neither when I’m in a celebratory mood or when I’m in a downtrodden one. But after setting out at the curb the corpse of the cat that had been decomposing just outside my laundry room window for nearly a month, I found myself saying “I really need a drink.”

Existential Angst for the Saved by the Bell Generation

Movie Review: Garden State

For his debut film, writer/director/lead actor Zack Braff has made 4/5 of a great movie.

He and co-star Natalie Portman offer strong and convincing performances as quirky 20-somethings trying to find their way in that lingering phase of transitional adulthood – that anxious time between graduating from college and settling down where you try to figure out what you want to do and who you want to be in your life. Call it existential angst for the "Saved by the Bell" generation.

The film presents a variety of interesting and amusing characters who demonstrate the different ways people cope with this time, as well as the universal angst the comes along with it. Think “Dazed and Confused” for this decade.

Although the script is generally very good with insightful dialogue at times, the story line and writing begins to falter towards the end of the film, falling into cliché and melodramatics.

However, this offbeat and compelling movie offers vivid imagery, unique characters, strong performances, and amazing music to help convey a realistic portrayal of what many people are going through as they try to make sense of their lives. I hope to see more great things in the future from this very talented up-and-coming filmmaker.

too much information?

So I just got an email titled "1pm-ish email" from my friend Alvaro mocking my "3pm-ish emails" that I had written while in LA. He noted in crude but concise language that he had just gone to the bathroom.

The best part was that he had sent it from his work email, so at the bottom there was an automatic warning message that included the line: "Privileged/Confidential Information may be contained in this message." Privledged information indeed.

Anonymous googling?

I was just asked the quote of the week:

"if you google someone, is there anyway he would ever know you looked him up? just wondering."

The Feet Don't Lie

It’s funny how a few weeks away from New York can make you feel like a tourist when you get back.

On my redeye back from LA, I had the good fortune to sit in an aisle seat next to and across from the only two people on the plane who kept their overhead lights on, preventing me from ever really falling asleep (because sleeping on an airplane seat is so refreshing as it is…) Needless to say, I was disheveled and out of sorts as I rode in my taxi back to my old neighborhood. I couldn’t give the cabbie simple directions or remember the correct cross streets of the area that I’ve been living in for almost 9 months. I felt like a newcomer all over again.

And then yesterday I walked through the terminal at Grand Central for the first time since I’ve been back. I’ve read somewhere (I think it was on a billboard that I saw while waiting for the LIRR once) that 35,000 people pass through Grand Central every hour. The tourists usually stop and stare up at the representations of the constellations on the aqua ceiling while the regular commuters try to navigate around them in order to catch their train on time and the office workers try to quickly get to their building.

Before I went to LA, I had considered myself a pro at making my way through a crowded space in New York; yesterday I felt like an idiot. I was side-stepping and bumping into people and mis-judging which way people would be turning. It only got worse as I walked down 34th street west of Harold Square and could not navigate the crowd like I used to. I would try to make a quick bypass around a street vendor selling hot nuts only to get stuck behind a group of tourists four people abreast and walking slowly.

I think it will take me a few days to get back in the saddle.

I remember a discussion that my coworker Cori and I had several months back – we were comparing different strategies for crowd navigation. I prefer the 'slightly out of focus panning the crowd ahead of me at eye level approach,' so I get a good sense of who’s out there in about a 30 foot range. I then automatically adjust my walking path and speed to anticipate where I think people walking towards and next to me are headed.

Cori, who’s shorter than I am, prefers to keep her eyes down, watching people’s feet to get a sense of their speed and anticipate any directional changes. She argues that while the look on people’s faces may betray the future walking path they will take, the feet don’t lie.

I’ve tried Cori’s crowd navigation approach occasionally, and I just don’t think it’s best for me. I like to keep my head up and get a sense of who I’m walking past. Sometimes, however, it does become overwhelming to encounter so many different faces of strangers in such a short amount of time. It can be exhausting and dehumanizing. That’s when I switch to the 'looking at the feet' approach.

SoCal, Signing Off

3pm-ish email, 8/12/04, part 2:

So evidently some people were upset by my sparse final email, so I've tried to muster something together that'll hopefully be more satisfying than a haiku.

It's been fun writing these emails, because it keeps me on my toes, trying to pan through my everyday experiences to find interesting or funny little things to write about. However, it's also been a little tough to come up with something to write about everyday.

Looking back, there were many people I met and experiences I had that I didn't write about...

- the crazy British-American guy at the hotel with whom I watched 3 nights of the Democratic Convention in the hotel common area because the cable in my room was on the fritz. He claims to be a former Greenpeace lawyer and is now an investment banker about to retire and buy 3 homes, though I've only seen him hanging around the extended-stay hotel common area for several weeks now in an old tee shirt, shorts, and flip flops.

- the hippie in Santa Baraba who has a modified Volkswagon van with litterally thousands of figurines - from Mickey Mouse to Darth Vader to Jesus Christ - attached to every possible square inch (inside and out) of his van. He was awesome. (Evidently, he's been travelling around for past 9 years since his wife left him..."this van's the only thing I got out of the divorce," he said). I have pictures.

- the power-tripping 17 year old movie theatre usher who told me that I had to eat my Cold Stone Creamery ice cream cone not while waiting in the concession line, but 10 feet away in the lobby, even though I had gotten the OK from the kid collecting tickets. I refused to move, so this guy stood right next to make sure I finished my ice cream without any funny business.

- attending 7:30am mass at the priest's house in downtown during my first few days here, and hugging the priests at the sign of peace.

- the poor choice of hot dogs, wine, and ice cream that my friend Alyssa and I purchased while watching the Los Angeles Philharmonic perform at the Hollywood Bowl

- meeting friends of my friend Meredith's friend from college at the bar The Bar who were a couple and both were named Michael (not Mike, mind you). One was in real estate, I think, and the other is in interior design (not interior decorating, mind you), and he's auditioning for one of those TV decorating, er, design shows.

- hanging out at a diner called "Swingers" where there were mulitple people reading scripts and the waitresses were blatently trying to "audition" in case a talent agent was sitting in their section

- going to the $.99 store (btw way, is it weird that there's not "cent" symbol on the keyboard anymore?) to buy a replacement cell phone ear piece and being horribly depressed by the people in front of me in line buying bags of potatos, totillas, and tic tacs.

I've definitely enjoyed my time out here in L.A., but am looking forward to coming back to New York. This is really a beautiful area with perfect weather, incredible views beautiful surroundings, and many different things to do and areas to explore. The main drawback I have to the area is that it's a car-based culture. LA is so big and so spread out that it feels very disconnected, in stark contrast to the interlocking neighborhoods and areas of New York. I like driving occasionally, but I hate commuting, sitting in traffic, having to drive to get anywhere, finding parking, the abundance of fast food options, the strip malls, and the smog.

Along with the smog in the skies, I've grown tired of the smugness in some people here. It's almost a shame that such an amazing place is wasted on such people. (Note: I've met some really cool and down to earth people as well, but there does seem to be an overall shallowness, superficilaity, sense of superiority in people out here).

I think that's my biggest question that I'm still trying to answer, and it goes for a lot of New Yorkers as well: why are people so obsessed with making themselves feel superior to other people? I read on Gawker.com about how the Vogue editorial staff competed in a soccer match wearing tee-shirts that read on the back "we're silently judging you." I feel like that's an overall accurate description for a lot of people - whether they be at a trendy LA club or a hipster New York lounge. I just don't get this part of human nature that makes people go out of their way to project a certain image to the outside world that is desperately tries to simulataneously set oneself apart while also fitting in to the dominate cultural group.

There's a mass market out there for people to feel superior to the mass market.

And so I bid farewell to SoCal. Goodbye to the security guard whose name I can't remember. Godbye to Palmer, that typical LA guy. Goodbye to the sparrow that was nearly squashed by Elizabeth. Goodbye to Sea World and Disney World and their hordes of humanity. Goodbye to the In-N-Out Burger. Goodbye to the 5, the 101, the 110, the 405, the 10, the 134 and the 710. Goodbye to trying to avoid hitting the bumps on the highway lane dividers. Goodbye to the palm trees and the beaches. Goodbye to the mountains. Goodbye to Malibu, Santa Baraba, Huntington Beach, Venice Beach, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Melrose, Beverly Hills, Downtown, Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, Anaheim, Long Beach, San Diego. Goodbye to Russ Reid people and your lack of public snacks but abundance of crete paper and ballons. Goodbye to the line of people standing outside the DMV that I passed each morning on my run. Goodbye to DaVinci Code-pushing surfer waiter. Goodbye to the cleaning lady who secretly judged me.

And finally, goodbye to the Falcon Waterfree Urinal. I think I'm going to miss you most of all.

A SoCal Haiku

3pm-ish email, 8/12/04:

SoCal: it's been real
People, places, and insights.
New York here I come.

Please stop

3pm-ish email, 8/11/04:

This is the second-to-last 3pm-ish email ever...who's getting sad? Ok, stop snickering over there.

I've actually had many more interesting experiences than I've been able to adequately cover in these emails. Tomorrow I think I'll give a quick run-down of all the different things I've done and characters I've met. Plus I hope to give an overall assessment of SoCal.

On Sunday evening I went to Santa Monica, a beach area that has this huge shopping area and a pier filled with boardwalk rides, games, and street performers. (I watched this one juggler guy who wasn't very good explain before his "grand finale" how he is a licensed street performer, so we all should pay him. Before doing his big trick, he walked around with his bucket demanding money and chastising people who walked away. Now that's entertainment.)

Are you ready for a messy run-on sentence? Good. Here it goes: I ended up going to this little English Pub that night because the salesman at the watch store found out that I was from out of town when I refused to fill out the warrantee card for the new watch I bought, so since he had only lived in the area for 8 months (he's from South Carolina and is working 2 retail jobs to support himself while he pursues his dream of being an actor), he suggested that I check out Sunday Karaoke at the non-typical LA pub, where I ended up meeting a few of his friends, including this guy "Dutch" who was visiting from South Carolina and is a former lawyer who is trying to make it with his Stone Temple Pilots-like band.

Dutch was surprisingly overly friendly and insisted that I sing a Karaoke song. This place had the biggest Karaoke selection binder I have ever seen in my life, and I had a hard time deciding between the literally thousands of artists and songs. I'm not good with that many choices. I'd rather have like 10 songs to choose from. I finally choose a song, and I choose poorly.

Perhaps as a subconscious homage to Mike, I decided to sing "Don't Stop" by Fleedtwood Mac. It wasn't until I turned in my request to the hostess that I realized that besides the main refrain, I really didn't know the words or how the song went, let alone how it started. I also increasingly regretted my selection as not a good fit for a Karaoke venue.

I was proved right.

When my name was called, I made my way through the crowded bar up to the perfomance area. I struggled to get started and fake my way through the opening lines. Those of you who have heard me sing know that I absolutely can't, so imagine not even really knowing the song's tunes. While I had a one table close to the stage filled with middle-aged woman singing along and showing dedication to my pefromance, I never fully found my groove with the song or the rest of the bar's audience.

It was approaching midnight, and to be honest, I couldn't stop thinking about tomorrow - hoping that it would soon be here, so my poor choice of song would be over and I could leave the premises.