Blogspot, balls.

In Salon's enumeration of this year's celebrity births:

Makani Ravello Harrelson, third daughter of Woody Harrelson and Laura Louie, whose birth announcement read: "In this crazy patriarchal world we live in, we are doing our part to balance the energy. We are proud to announce the completion of our goddess trilogy with the birth of our third daughter."

Right.

Blogspot, tea leaf egg.

Stop the presses! It turns out that parties with middle aged, middle class Chinese folk are boring, strictly dry affairs (redundancy?). They leave me wondering if this is what biology grad student parties at Brigham Young University are like: lots of lively, sober conversation about Pfizer's failed clinical trial, anecdotes about happenings at church, a violin recital by an 8 year old.

To be fair though (given the spirit of Christmas and all that jazz), these are very well-intentioned partygoers, especially my parents, who go out of their way to include me in the card game they are playing (but not for money! we do not gamble here at BYU). From what I've picked up, the game's got quite a burst of old-country flair. For example, if you have a pair of the 4 of diamonds, you can "start a revolutionary movement" and change the starting suit, which matters somehow. Taken as a whole, the rules are pretty arbitrary--I would even venture to say ridiculous. I could tell my mom was disappointed when I bowed out of the role as her cardholder / apprentice.

In the living room of this house, the elderly have collected to play MahJong. I wouldn't dream of participating here. Old Chinese people are hardcore, and I couldn't want to get reparitive veneers for Christmas. The only girl here even approaching my age (I'd estimate she's 16) is playing with the grandmas. She has not spoken a word all night. I suspect that she is mute.

In contrast, the under-10 set are literally bouncing off the walls (I saw the hostesses' daughter run into a wall, giggle and then hide under a table). Earlier, the kids were playing that game where one kid hides some artifact (in this case a tiny stuffed rabbit) and shouts hotter/colder to direct the other players to his quarry. I believe this game may be called "Hotter/Colder." It's very strange to hear a 7 year old boy shrieking alternately "Isabella is the hottest!" and "Jason is the hottest!". Defined sexual orientations be damned!

I pass the time by reading. The host is a doctor, so his shelves are lined with medical dictionaries and texts. From perusing them, I have found that the existence of many congenital defects necessitates the existence of many pictures of autopsied babies.

I have now spent more than seven hours at this party. That 16 year old girl still has not spoken a single word. At this point I'm wondering if she is the human vessel for some unspeakable rancor against man. The other option is that, like me, she is really bored.

Merry Christmas!

Blogspot, liar.

A few months ago, my iPod and computer crashed simultaneously (Andy Rooney cries for me at this, duh). I had to rebuild my music collection, previously collected over the course of 4 years. To date, the task is woefully incomplete, as noted by a co-worker, who regularly harasses me about having 4GB of music on a 20GB iPod.

Last night, I finally restored my former collection of Abandoned Pools songs--my favorite being an upbeat number titled "Ruin Your Life." It reminded me of my senior year of high school, when my friend and I would cut class and drive to Trenton on a semi-episodic basis to thrift shop among indigents, listening to Morrocan ethnic radio (no lie) and above-mentioned band on the way. Every marking period I'd recieve letters from the Board of Education in the mail informing me that that I'd missed Calculus four times and if I missed it again, I'd fail the course. I got a B-, which, in Asian terms is failure anyway.

Once, instead of going south, we took the PATH into New York for the purpose of shopping at Screaming Mimi's, which our Modern Europe teacher had recommended to us. That was the day I learned that, unlike the Trenton thrift warehouse, New York's garments of yesteryear cost a truckload of money. My knack for recollection spinning up to maximum drive here: It was a rainy and windy day--winds that snapped Zach Bushnell's umbrella basically the second we exited onto Christopher Street. A billboard with bottles of Snapple dressed as the Village People welcomed us to the city with a gay, gay hello. We made a midday of it, and made it back to school in time to catch absolutely no classes.

It was fun, despite the weather. Of course, this doesn't hold a candle to July 2002--a perfect summer day in Washington Square Park that, ironically, I never actually experienced while actually attending NYU. A story for another day, I think.

Blogspot, aged to perfection for three years at the McIlhenny cellars.

A couple weeks ago Joe won the Williamsburg Spelling Bee. I was munching on a panini when he spelled his final word. Unfortunately, none of us remembers since it was impossible to pronounce. His final word wasn't exactly a "winning word" in the sense that Rebecca Sealfon's E-U-O-N-Y-M was. Unlike in the Scrips Spelling Bee, where the bee mechanics ensure that the winner claims their victory by spelling something right, the Williamsburg Bee crowns a winner when the runner-up spells something wrong. It basically boils down to: In Williamsburg, every victory is necessarily sealed with scads of negative energy. I myself cannot spell for shit. They had a layman's mini-bee during a break in the competition. I wasn't in it, but I played along. I was eliminated on the word cantaloupe (reproduced correctly here).

As part of his prize haul, Joe won two prime seats for the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which I went to last night. The songs were pretty mediocre (A song without any motifs? Balderdash!), but the dialogue was snappy. Joe commented that it would have been amazing as a stage play. I'll disagree here, as without musical interludes it would have been tres difficult to peer into the home lives of the contestants: a fat dancing asthmatic boy, blazer-wearing girl who is the head of her elementary school's Gay Straight Alliance an incredibly adorable latchkey kid in pink overalls and...some other characters. The three above were the ones I fixated on. Actually, there was an overacheiving Asian girl. During her solo, I leaned over to Joe and whispered in his ear, in as Gollum-esque a manner as possible: "my child."

Still, I wish the tunes were a little more musical.

Afterwards, Joe stayed over and we cuddled--awkwardly, as I found out come daybreak. Now I have this intense aching running down the left side of my back. When I swivel my head in that direction, I feel like there are 3000 petite Japanese masseuses digging their toes into my back muscles. It's very unpleasant. Trying to cross 16th Street this morning, I couldn't check the street for traffic, so I did had to do a full-body 180 to make sure I didn't die. (To be fair, Beth Israel is right there, so if the impact didn't break my face/heart/brain/lungs/kidneys/GI tract, I stood a good chance of getting away with just being a paraplegic for the rest of my life. Still.) It's times like that when I wish I was an owl, or the girl from The Exorcist--in fact, probably the only time.

Blogspot, Destroyer of Bonnie Lasses,

Working at my current job, (henceforth referred to in my own personal history as the job that taught me to always (always, always) ask for more money), I've had to feed myself in Midtown. I haven't exactly found niche methods of obtaining food, as have my spiritual brothers: the fishing cat and alligator snapping turtle. Rather, my recent forays into eating 'habits' have been pretty absolutist--that is to say: I have the same fucking deli food every day. In Midtown, there are no choices. Chipotle is a crowded and distant luxury.

So for the last few days I've been going to the Liberty Deli and buying the same roasted chicken on yellow rice. I take it back to my desk, where I feast with my hands like I'm at Medieval Times--popular theme restaurant of Rutherford, NJ slash my youth. It's a quiet time in my day, and I enjoy it. True to personal custom, I take my sweet time and leave virtually nothing on the bone, taking the remaining skeleton and dumping it. Since I don't throw away any paper trash, instead piling it on my desk (in hopes that I one day become Jonathan Pryce's everyman bureaucrat character in Brazil), those chicken bones are all that ever appear in the trash bin.

I wonder how it must feel to be the cleaning lady, who nightly sees the same thigh and shin bones, polished as ivory beacons gleaming in the flourescent lighting, set agaist the jet plastic of the trash bin.

"Surely this is the work of no man!" I imagine her thinking to herself. "And that arid smell! It is as brimstone!" Actually, it is tabasco, courtesy of a bottle I stole from Chipotle two weeks ago.

Continuing her line of reasoning, she infers that my spit is a miracle solvent, kills me, isolates my salivary glands and wins a prize from the American Chemical Society.

Blogspot, vessel of my return to the internets,

I'm at work right now, alternately reading a Slate diary piece by David Rakoff dating late 1990s and piecing together the skeleton of a report that will one fine day, God-willing, be perused by those haughty, misunderstood lords of the urban jungle: hedge-fund analysts. In so doing, I've recognized that after you read Author X's book, you come to see bits and pieces of that book's prose show up in, say, an article they once penned about my favorite Chinese restaurant. In plundering their past work, Rakoff brings together sundered bits of long living as a gay Canadian Jew into a Kefka's Tower (or a Frankenstein--for those uninitated in the ways of 1993 era RPG dorkdom) of words.

Oh oh, here! A sentence about how staying thin is the central preoccupation of our intrepid protagonist's life in a story about a dinner party! I remember that from his book, in a piece where he climbs New Hampshire's Mt. Monandnock (incidently, this very blog recounts my story of the same feat of strength). Being thin has always been one of those things I could count on, like fanatical Christianity or the inherent goodness of man, but lately it has been faltering. My friend and I used to barter information. I would help her with her organic chemistry work, and she would relay me the latest from my cusp-of-forgotten homeland (North Jersey, not be be confused with China) and useful eating-disorder tips (drink lots of water, eat boiled celery). I should make overtures to reignite this cultural exchange once more. Note to self.

Sure, I am reading--but, being a multitasker of uncommon caliber, I am also chatting with boyfriend and coworker alike (all the while avoiding the sweeping gaze and honed talons of our lord and savior, the COO). In this conversation, I play the intermediary, Ctrl-C-ing, editing and then Ctrl-V-ing snippets of thought from one window to another. In my own way, I am making the office environment a sad hotbox of social interaction. Oh look, we just coined a term!

Tacomagentic (Adj):
1. The quality of an item attracting tacos through the interaction of tortilla with d-orbital electrons
2. Being possessed of Tacomagnetism (see: thesis-induced hunger)

It is not in the huddled laager at the top of a lexicographer's tower where neologisms are born, but in the mid-levels of 444 Madison Avenue.

I am losing my shit.