Gerty Goes Shopping

Gerty, like most women, loves to shop. However, Gerty is no ordinary shopper. You see...she's a compulsive purchaser of things that she can't afford. That in itself is not unusual. This is America and this country thrives on consumer overspending, does it not? Gerty, being a proud American patriot, does her part for her country in this respect, does she not? Yes and no. She does her patriotic overspending duty but part of what makes this ritual work for the US of A is that these thriftless wonders generally pay the bills they accumulate. Gerty don't play 'dat.

Gerty loves to buy very overpriced items - things that are as costly as they are useless - pretty much anything they sell on an infomercial. I once visited Gery's apartment to find that it was impossible to enter due the the volume of exercise equipment that she'd purchased from informercials she'd watched while "working" from home over a period of two months. She's the first to admit she has a bit of a struggle with her weight - especially around the mid section. So why not buy an Abdominizer? When it became clear that the Abdominizer was not as self-acting as the infomercial had depicted it to be, she realized that it would not work for her. I understand and I think we all can. After all, if you pay $500 dollars plus shipping and handling for a machine to melt your abs, the fat should melt off as soon as you turn over your credit card number, right? So when the Abdominizer failed to do what it claimed, she went for the Roller Abs. This promised to be easy. It was billed as not just "low impact" but "NO impact"! Who needs impact when they are trying to lose weight? One of the reasons we got overweight in the first place was because we're lazy and exercise equipment that actually requires movement or impact just doesn't work for people of our ilk. The trouble is...Gerty got this contraption with it's huge moving handles and extended foot pedals and it just was way too bulky. It looked much smaller on the sound stage in the infomercial. What the heck?
Next she decided to go smaller and get a couple of items that were not going to take up as much space: the Z-Abber and the "Ab Wheel". The Z-abber was Gerty's favorite because it required virtually no effort at all to use. Of course, it sent electric shocks through her body at a constant rate of 15 per minute, which may or may not have caused the benign tumor to grow to its current enormity within her tummy area, rendering the whole ab-shaping venture a complete waste of time. The Ab Wheel just hurt her knees, so that was that!

Were Gerty more entrepreneurial, she might have opened an ab studio in her living room, but that was not to happen. Instead, she just put all that crap in an air-conditioned storage unit in Westchester.

Artistic License Revoked

I consider myself to be somewhat of an artist. I know writing is not a performing art but that doesn't mean that I don't want an audience for my "art". Obviously, I want people to read most of what I write; however, I think it goes without saying that I don't want a mass audience to read my private texts or e-mails and I don't want anyone to read my private journal. There are things, like this blog, which are meant to be read by a wide audience. Keeping that in mind, I make an effort to entertain or to educate or at least to philosophize.

Perhaps I've been cursed with a very banal view of art. Maybe I'm dense and I don't understand more complex artistic expression, but I am just now in a state of expressive discombobulation because I just accidentally watched a documentary on one of those pot-smoker's movie channel's like Sundance or IFC...I really don't even know the difference sometimes. Anyway, I saw a documentary about a Japanese "dancer" named, Oguri. Apparently he got a whole film crew, co-dancers (or whatever they're called), and, perhaps most amazingly, an audience to schlep through the desert for several days, to enact some sort of spasmodic poky dance. I think it was edited down to about three minutes in the documentary, as that's all a TV audience could possibly bear - even while high. It seems that Mr. Oguri was interpreting the movement of the desert plant life via dance. Since desert plant life doesn't move very much, neither does he. Since desert plant life is dry and crusty, so is he.

My problem with the whole thing is two-fold. The first being that I am just annoyed that ten or so seemingly healthy human beings who could be out in the world doing some good by, you know, maybe working on a farm or tending to the sick, are plodding through the desert to perform an insipid dance for nearly no one (understandably) and spending at least a few dollars of someone's money to do this. Why? What's the point? The whole thing seems very self-indulgent. My other, perhaps bigger problem with this is that it frustrates me when I think that I've been writing plays and screenplays for years and no one has been willing to spend the money to help bring my work to life. I know it might not be perfect but at least I don't want to bring my audience out to the middle of nowhere and put their lives in danger just to listen and watch.

Maybe I'm just jealous.

Note to Self: Define

I've thought a lot about how I should define myself when I'm asked (by the type of person who asks such questions), "how do you define yourself?". I think a deep question like that merits a response that's as well thought out as the plans of the inquisitor - the insightful intellectual who conjured the emotion within their soul to create such a conundrum just to keep the simple folk in check.
I was flipping through one of those music-flipper things (I think that's the technical term) that you see in old diners. This one was actually in one of the Jackson Hole burger chains in the city, but it's kind of set up like a diner. It was in this home of the 7-oz burger where I might have reached my most profound moment of self-realization. It was as if I had been squatting alone in utter darkness and someone had suddenly turned on a very bright light. I was flipping through the music flipper and I spotted the music title that said it all...the lyric that would define ME. Just below "Oops I did it Again" and "She Bangs" was the greatest Queen title of them all, "I'm in Love with My Car".
I was literally stunned by the profundity and it's relevance to my existence. I could barely move or stop looking at the title as I sat in this rustic mid-town burger joint - alone - eating really good pickles.
The amazing thing is I don't even know Freddy Mercury - and of course I mean that in the spiritual sense since he's dead; but I didn't know him when he was alive either. The real quandary here is (aside from me hating the world quandary and then using it so freely) that I didn't even own a car at that moment. So, HOW could I have been in love with my car? Ah! But that's the point, isn't it.

Who The F CoOpted the Word "Urban" And Made It Black?

I am so sick of the media taking perfectly generic terms and making them into something so specific that any real sense is taken out of the word.  Case in point: "Urban".  I have always considered myself to be urban.  I grew up in an urb, as it were. and while I never refer to myself as "urban", I do consider myself abso-friggin'-lutely urban.  I am not only from New York City, but I'm from the freekin' Bronx!  Who has more of a right to be urban than that.  I am NOT, however, even slightly black.  While I support the right of all races to refer to themselves as urban, I take offense to the notion that I am not urban simply due to a my lack of pigmentation.  It's not just annoying, it's ridiculous.  I also think it's racist. It's like they create these names because somehow it's either politically or socially incorrect to refer to people by their race - at least that seems to hold true for black, hispanic and asian peoples.  White people, on the other hand, have no special names; at least not polite ones.

Real estate agents do this with neighborhoods that are either not trendy enough or have a bad reputation in order to get those prone to duchebaggery to pay higher rents.  (See: NoLiTa; Upper Yorkville, SpaHa.)  Now various media are using it to make us believe that all urbanites are black.  Is that because "Cinemax's first BLACK erotic television series" wont appeal to anyone?  How fargin' racist is that?

How I Feel When I Eat A Cupcake

It seems like a lot of other adults I know don't really like cupcakes that much. I sometimes feel a little odd when I am around cupcakes, myself. It's part cautious as I don't want to seem too eager to jump on the cupcakes and seem too greedy and it's part shame as I scan the area for children, for whom the cupcakes were probably intended.

That said, I do discriminate among cupcakes. Not all of them are created equally and most of them are not that great. For example, there is a very famous bakery here in New York named after a certain type of tree. I won't say which but it rhymes with Mongolia. Actually - that's a lie. It doesn't rhyme with Mongolia but it almost does; but it's not Asian in any way. Anyway, the point is the cupcakes there look amazing but they don't taste so good. Too dry. They probably comply with that crappy "no trans fat" law we have in New York. Our toothpick mayor thinks we need to be healthier. Whatever. So, the "Mongolian" cupcakes don't do it for me.

I was walking up a certain street in Midtown East when I used to live there one sunny afternoon. I passed a place that actually had the name 'cupcake' in it! I was pleased as pie. (I love pie too.) I then proceeded to pay $1.90 for a friggin' cupcake. Not a big one, mind you. A normal-sized cupcake. It was puuurdy. But it tasted like nothing I'd ever tasted before...especially a cupcake. It was crap.

People laugh at me but for me the best cupcakes are the ones my mom and/or my sisters used to make. They weren't even from scratch. They were simple Duncan Heins Moist Delux cupcakes! Yellow, Devil's Food, Marble - whatever. They were the best! I love that store-bought icing as well. I HATE when people make it themselves and it just tastes like sugar. The only substitute I can handle is preserves or jelly with coconut or maybe melted chocolate on top of a mini bundt cake. Just give me the damn store-bought preservative-laden stuff. It just tastes so goooood.

I made some cupcakes today for my wife's birthday. Her birthday isn't today but I couldn't wait. I really wanted one. I eagerly watched them baking through the oven door and the smell was making my belly churn. When they were cooling I was like an expectant father pacing the floor for his newborn jelly donut...I mean, bouncing bundle of joy. (That jelly donut comment was purely for effect. I HATE jelly donuts.) I couldn't help but stick my fingers in the container as I spread the gooey chocolate icing on the now-cooled yellow cupcakes. Mmmmm. S u g a r. I love it with all my heart.

I often eat the cupcakes before they are totally cooled and they don't taste as good like that but I simply can't wait. I did that today too. Kind of a waste of one perfectly good cupcake. After I ate it I was unsatisfied and I started to worry that the child had left my body - that I was losing my inner niño. But, thank God, I ate another one when the cooled and it rocked. I felt satisfied from the inside out. I had the proper flashback to birthday's of old - like the time when my mom baked like 100 cupcakes for my entire 2nd grade class and she wrote my name is blue icing on all the cupcakes. It was like I was some kind of cupcake celebrity! We had so many we had to invite the 1st grade to share them. Of course I could've eaten at least 20 by myself. I'd have gotten sick, but who cares. Those were some cupcakes. That was a great day. Each time I eat a cupcakes I remember that day. That, combined with the fact that they just taste so damn awesome, makes eating cupcakes a truly blissful experience for me. Enough said.

Mala Suerte

One of the first words I learned in Spanish was "suerte". I liked the way it sounded. Most of all I knew I didn't have any of it and envy is notably motivational.
There is that silly expression about being lucky in love and unlucky in everything else. That is mostly true for me. I have a great wife and a great family and I think at least some great friends who love me. Then again, love is tricky. We never really know if it's there. It's intangible. Not like 196 million crisp dollar bills: the same dollars I did NOT win in the MegaMillions lottery last week. I was really upset about that. I kind of needed the cash. Of course I probably wouldn't have taken the money in one-dollar bills. That would just be silly. They also would have taxed about 55 percent of it so I'd only be able to roll around in about 89 million dollars. There weren't enough 9's involved I guess.
Yesterday was a particularly unlucky day for me. I was supposed to do the laundry, as I had promised my darling wife but I woke up very late and as I was running late for an appointment downtown I quickly dressed and left the building. It was raining that annoying drizzly rain that is just enough to make you extremely wet in a three-block walk but not enough to justify the use of an umbrella. Anyway, I didn't have an umbrella, or a jacket as I'd hurried out of the apartment. I rushed to the subway station where I swiped my Metrocard and found it to be empty. In a rush, I swiped the next Merocard in my wallet which was a funny white color instead of the usual yellow. Well, hellz yeah, this one worked and I rushed through the turnstile. I started down the stairs when a large, fat, dark voice shouted "mister" several times. ..."excuse me, mister!".
I reluctantly turned around and found myself faced with a rotund police officer smirking at me. "Can I see the Metrocard you used to swipe in, please?"
My hands shaking, I pulled out the empty yellow card and showed it to him.
"No, I think there's another one in there somewhere. That's not the one you used."
I reluctantly showed him the white one. I knew what it was. It was my nephew's. He'd been visiting me a couple of days prior and left his Metrocard with me because he - out of pure teenage laziness - doesn't carry a wallet. I had it in mine and forgot to return it when he left. He never called me to look for it, so there it was - in my wallet...waiting for me to use it. The trouble is it's a school subway pass meant for children and it's provided free to all New York City students under 18 years of age.
I mean, I think I look pretty good for my age, but maybe not younger than 18.
The officer was kind enough to ask me my age when he saw the student Metrocard but he didn't really wait for me to answer before he asked the next question:
"Have you ever been arrested?"
I felt my heart in my throat: "No. Not yet."

This was the first and only time that I have ever gotten a free subway ride in my entire life of riding the MTA's sorry-ass excuse for a transportation system and wouldn't you know it...mala suerte! Maldita sea!!!! The mo-fo didn't arrest me but he did give me a 60-dollar ticket and humiliate me for 20-minutes or so in the subway station. I was even the butt of some jokes while there. Two young black gentlemen passed by and saw this round, black officer all but handcuffing me, screeching on his walkie-talkie and muttered rather unmutteringly clearly: "Now there's something you don't see every day. We should take a picture."

I was late for my appointment. It was a job interview. Needless to say I didn't get it.

When I got home a few hours later my wife had told me some friends were coming to pick us up to go out to a bar. So I quickly got changed. Being that it was still a rainy day, I looked for my blue rain jacket but I was having the darnedest time finding it. "Honey, do you know where my blue jacket is?"
"Oh, I sent it to the laundry. It was so dirty."
"Did you happen to take the car keys and the money out of the pockets?"
- "No. Why would you leave the keys in the pocket?"
"Um....I don't know but....$$*)#(#*$@(#&$(*&@(~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pretty much everything I said after that is unprintable. This is a family blog.
The sad thing is that that was the only key for the car and I had to pay 100 dollars for that key and it took a week for the car company to make it. Money's kind of tight so I didn't make two keys.

Maybe my bad luck is my fault. I mean, obviously I did some stupid things but I was certainly helped out a lot by other people's stupid things, no?

Anyway. Yesterday my mom broke a rib at home. She apparently fell and broke it and now she's in pain. Of course, she's 78 and wears 4-inch high heels all day, every day. One could argue that she also was stupid or silly in her habits.

However, I do think that all these bad things happened in one day...one unlucky day. Yet, everyone is alive today and nothing really bad has happened...knock on wood. I'm still married to the most beautiful girl in the world and have the greatest, sweetest mom anyone could ever hope for. I live in the best city in the world and have a relatively stress-free life (though I constantly make stressful situations out of it because I think all humans have a need for stress even if we try really hard to avoid it, as I do) and mostly - a lot of love.

I'm still pissed off about not winning the lottery though.

The Number 9

Okay. Now is the time when anyone who reads this blog will realize that its writer is crazy, assuming they haven't already.

I am obsessed with the number 9; but in my defense, I have to say that I have some semi-logical reasons: The first being that 9 is a magic number. If you don't believe me you can read about it on wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_(number)

The main 'magic' happens when you multiply 9 by any number the resulting digits will ALWAYS add up to 9.
The other great thing about 9 is that it's the biggest or highest digit! So naturally it's superior to all the others. It has real value and you can find 9's everywhere!

So, what's my connection to the 9?

Well, here's why I'm so into it: If you add up all the digits on the day I was born (year, month, day) it adds up to 18 which adds up to 9. Get it?

I like 9's so much that I can accept 3's and 6's in my life as well and any number whose digits add up to 3 or 6. That's because 9 is divisible by 3 and 6 plus 3 is 9.

Here's where it gets weird: I do almost everything in 9's now. I work out in sets of 9. It could be 3, 6 or 9 sets of 9. I try to use weights that measure out to a 9. For example: A 45 pound weight is perfect. However, this does present a problem when I want to make progress and my next choice is 50 or 60, I have to jump to 60 and then the next would be 90. I do make concessions and add half pounds and add in decimals to make things work out better for my mathematical urges.

I also got married when I was 36 in 2007. So you might see some 9 add-ups in there. My wife, sadly, was born on days that add up to 7, which she claims is her lucky number. However, I did find that if you add our wedding date together with her birth date the single digits add up to 6 which is an acceptable number.

I looked up our 'numerology' on some website and I am apparently a 1 and she is an 8 but that is because they include the '19' in the year but I don't include that because it screws up my neat little 9 situation.

Neptune is my favorite planet because in the memory-jogging sentence, "My very educated mother just served us NINE pies", the 'n' in 'NINE' represents Neptune! Cool no? And Neptune really is a cool planet - no pun intended. I'm a Pisces and Neptune is an aquatic god, so that makes total sense to me. Additionally, Neptune and Pluto apparently pull a switcheroo every so often and Neptune is actually the 9th planet for the sun!

Well I'm going to stop now. I have a lot more to say about this but I am starting to sound like I have nothing happening in my brain except nonsense.

Judge Mental

I've been accused of being judegemental before and for good reason. Sometimes I am judgemental. I know it and I accept it becuase I think everyone is guilty of this from time to time.
Case in point: This morning, I opened up MSN and found a link to a story that caught my eye. At first, I had decided to ignore it. I almost felt my hand pushing the mouse toward the icon and conciously made the decision not to go all the way.
I read a couple of news itmes and checked my e-mail. Then, as I signed off e-mail, I got that golldang icon again....the one with Brittney Spears' sister's image staring at me with the caption, "Whatsername may be pregnant". Okay, it said her name but I forgot what it is and I don't want to look it up and lose my train of thought.
I guiltily clicked on the story and read about three sentences. It was enough. Brittney Spears' sixteen-year-old sister is knocked up by some dude she met in church.
The nasty thought that immediately sprang to my mind (as I'm sure it did to that of so many) was that if anyone had been unsure of the level of white-trash that was embodied in the Spears gene pool, little sis just confirmed that it was pretty dang high.

Now, as sad as it is that this young girl is knocked up, I think that it's kind of sad that I am judging her: for thinking her a slut, a whore, a teenage jezebel, for thinking of her mother as a bad parent, a dirty piece of redneck waste, for thinking of her skank sister as a bad role model.
Who am I, after all? I'm not even rich or famous. I could be considered white trash by some people. In fact, the other day I heard a patron at the bar I work at refer to me as white trash behind my back - when he thought I wasn't listening.
Of course I think he's wrong. If I were really white trash, I would have blown some mucous into his scotch. To be honest, the thought never even crossed my mind. I was too busy pretending not to be offended and telling myself that I misunderstood what I thought I'd heard.
Does that make me not white trash? Maybe not. Maybe I am. Maybe we all are - except black and chinese and indian people. They are black, indian or asian trash.
Wait....maybe I am white trash! I just referred to asians as Chinese! Worse yet, I wrote 'chinese' with a small c! I am a terrible, horrible person.

POINT: Judging is mental. Lets shoot the judges. (But please don't kill them because that's violent and violence is bad. Ugh. Here I am now, judging people who are violent. Or am I?

facetiae

Facetiae, is a word that you will probably never use, though it describes something you might want to describe.
I'm not going to tell you what it means.
Perhaps you know already because you 'speak' Latin or because you're a pseudo intellectual.
Maybe it was a Word of the Day and you - for whatever reason - recall its meaning.
In any case, it's a fairly useless word. Not because it lacks meaning but because it's just not recognized - and I doubt it ever will be - by the masses. It sounds way too much like something brown and sticky - a wet turd. There's a word that people don't use every day but still recognize. Turd. Has a nice ring to it.
As a child I referred to all my teachers and other enemies as "turds" or "stupid turds" or "fat turds" or "lousy turds". I was obsessed with turds.
What does that say about me? I'm afraid to ponder the subject any further.
That's all for now.

Emptyheadedness

Have you ever had the sense that your mind was completely empty? That you had lost any and everything you'd had in there? Just for a moment? A second, maybe?
Well, I have. It's scary.
Without our memories, without thoughts, without the ability to make a command: existence seems pointless.
I don't like being pointless. If I wanted to lead a life of pointlessness (emptyheadedness) I'd have to become a politician. That would be terrible. I'd rather be a prisoner - an innocent prisoner, though.

Useless Advice

I have always been more of an advice giver than an advice taker.

It's interesting that I rarely take advice from anyone. I always feel that what people tell me is either good information or bad. I decide almost immediately what I am going to do with that information; I'll either file it away in the mental drawer labeled, "Good Advice that I should take even if I already think I know it" or the other one (the big one) labeled, "Crap".

I am sure that I give out lots of Crap to many people who talk to me. I am not a good example to follow. I am completely and utterly financially unsuccessful. I have very few close friends. I have rarely participated in the most basic events of human life which tend to shape the average person's decision making processes. I have almost always rejected the obvious in favor of the absurd. I'm totally self-absorbed - just look at my use of the word "I" in this blog.

YET, I know that it is a very basic tenet of my personage, the EJ inside me all the time, that one should always consider every detail of their actions and how those actions will affect others.
I am not sure how these two facets of my personality coexist in any kind of harmony. Maybe they don't and that's why I so often find myself feeling low.

This belief that your actions, my actions - that they are directly linked to everyone else through even the slightest gesture - is something that seems so basic to me. Of course someone will know or be affected when I do something that is dishonest or cruel or wonderful and fantastic. I often feel I do things that are a total waste of time to the casual observer but to me these seemingly useless actions somehow make the world safer. Or not. Maybe they just make me feel better. My feeling better can affect how I treat others and then I pass on that positive sense to my neighbors. That's good, isn't it?

Unfortunately, I often feel badly, even if I've done something nice or harmless because I think I could have spent my time more 'wisely' - whatever that means.

I do and say a lot of awful things as well and I'm always sure that those words and deeds trickle through the air and make someone miserable somewhere - even if it's not my intended victim.

At moments when I, myself, feel sad, lonely, miserable, vulnerable, wronged by life - I want to take back all of the bad things I've ever said about anyone and undo all of the evil I've done, no matter how tiny and forgettable it might seem. Life is too short to be painful, even if the pain does make it more memorable.

I don't know. Maybe pain, misery, suffering - maybe these are necessary evils; kind of like Hilary Clinton and George Bush or Osama bin Laden and Kim Jung Il. They seem so inessential but the world would be really different without them and not necessarily better.

Wait - I'm being political! That's not really me.
At least I'm offending both major political parties on equal levels.

I often wish I were a different person: someone who is cool, financially secure, worldly, sophisticated, has smartitude, likes chickens...but then I realize that to have all those things I would have to be mostly clueless about the rest of the world - the world outside my immediate experience.

If I Ruled The World - OR - When I'm Dictator of The World, I'll...

Nostradamus' ghost seems hell bent on ruining the future. His predictions are so full of death and destruction that it just makes me wonder why anyone would want to read his cryptic "prophecies", much less make them into TV specials for the History Channel. Truth be told, I wanted to watch the latest "Lost Book of Nostradamus" but I've been so overly occupied that I didn't get a chance to see it on The History Channel. Now that I've analyzed the situation, I believe the right course of action is for me never to watch the show. For one thing, I saw that movie documentary that the dude from Citizen Kane and those Paul Masson commercials made before his heart exploded from fatness. I saw it when I was just a child and it basically stayed with me for my entire life. I grew up SURE that New York (my home town) was going to be blown to smithereens by turban-wearing terrorists. When I got off the subway at 9:AM on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, late for work, seeing all the nacos on the street running at that ungodly hour and looking south on Canal, toward the hole in the first hit tower, and then seeing the second plane hit the other tower, my mind went immediately to that old documentary Orson Welles did. I remembered seeing cartoons of zombie-like people in the streets of what was called "new city". I remembered those re-enactments showing an Arab man ordering rockets to be shot toward New York. None of these thoughts were pleasant at all. They just fed a paranoia that had been deeply embedded in my brain - has been, actually. The point is, I have come to believe - or hope, that since Nostradamus, or Nos, as I like to call him, was just another quack who somehow got worldwide attention and created a series of self-fulfilling prophecies. As such, these SFPs can become SUPs or Self-Unfulfilled Prophecies. One of the ways I would like help facilitate this SFP to SUP process is to declare myself a prophet, gain worldwide acceptance and then, turn things around on old Nos and prophesy that Superman will fight the terrorists, wipe out the virus and zap the meteor out of the sky, saving the Earth for at least the next million years. I think I have quack potential. Don't you? The best part about all this is that people would love me and I'd then, hopefully, get to rule the world. Then I could really start making changes. The first thing I'd do is make public transportation free. Nobody should have to pay for the crap we get - at least in New York City. I'm soooooo sick of the subway. It's easily the most miserable part of my day, standing on the trains amidst the masses of funkmeisters carrying luggage! What the H E double hockey sticks is up with these people carrying their damn wheeled luggage on the rush-hour trains? Have we really gotten so lazy that we can't pick up and carry our briefcases? What amount of crap do people need to carry around? Those people really squeeze my bojangles. The next thing I'd like to do is create a worldwide currency to facilitate travel. Of course this would wipe out several businesses but I would be a world leader unsympathetic to the money mongers of the Earth and I wouldn't listen to their cries. Next I would put a hold on all the wars until each warring tribe/nation/ethnic group writes me up a 10,000 word essay on why they need to win their respective wars. The winning essay would get a year's-supply of fruit and meat. The next thing I would do would be to remove all gym equipment from prisons around the world. Why are we letting these people get stronger? Isn't that dangerous? I'd also like to remove all metal/plastic and glass from the prisons...except for the bars, of course. For my final decree, before retiring to my secret Empirical Palace in Mauritius, I would create a flat tax of 10% worldwide and set a salary cap on all world employees of 200,000 World Dollars...which would be something like a Euros, only less snotty.

Why I Love Public Transportation

I haven't blogged for a while and have been hatin' on my daily trips to work, so I'm going to take a moment to digitally ponder my life as a commuter.

My mother is a life-long New Yorker. That means she can't drive. Given that situation, I have been forced onto subways and buses since I was old enough to walk.

Mom didn't stroller me into subways and buses because that involved carrying stuff and slowed her down - and Mom liked to move fast. She used to be one of those race-walkers - only she used high-heels instead of sneakers.

Ma didn't want to waste time by trying to stuff my stroller into a bus or train. That's probably why I walked when I was just 7 months old - she wanted to make sure I was ready for the commute and wouldn't slow her down.

Anyway, I traveled on the number 12 bus and the number 6 train from as far back as I can remember, with my mother. I recall being like four and my mother running and making me follow her through the sliding doors that link the subway cars so that we could get to the middle car where the conductor was. That was the 70s and a woman with a small kid was ripe for being mugged in New York and she felt comforted by Jerome and his lethal flashlight. The fact that I was terrified of falling between cars didn't seem to faze my mother who sometimes was three or four steps ahead of me. I usually closed my eyes when I stepped from one car to the other, holding my breath and letting out a sigh of relief each time I made it across the mysterious abyss that peaked through the gap between the subway cars.

I remember how the lights used to go on and off all the time on the subways (which were covered in graffiti) - whenever the subway came to a stop. Sometimes we'd be stuck in a dark tunnel for ten minutes with nothing but B.O. to give me a sense that anyone else was around. Had the train needed to be evacuated, I'd have to follow the stink of other commuters to find my way out. I've never had good night vision. Good nightmares, but not good night vision.

As I grew older, the AIDS epidemic began to take its toll on the heroin-shooting homeless of New York and they became more aggressive about panhandling on the subways. From the time I was in high school until the first year of the Giuliani administration, I swear I never got on a subway without at least one would-be homeless person coming into the car to announce that he or she had had AIDS yet they were not drug addicts nor were they alcoholics and that they were trying very hard to get back into life via some form of treatment. Sometimes they'd add that they had six or seven children at home to feed. It's interesting to think that they were shooting heroine with six or seven kids at home who needed things like food and diapers.

I don't mean to sound unsympathetic to AIDS victims. I mean to sound unsympathetic to annoying people who smell bad. I am totally unsympathetic to people who choose their own cards and then expect others to pay up when they're dealt the losing hand. Furthermore, to be frank, these beggars were very annoying. They were even more annoying than the mental case riders without AIDS - who had all their limbs and none of their marbles. At least I could laugh at them without feeling guilty.

Over time the little sympathy I have for beggars on the subway has diminished to virtually no sympathy at all. Recently, as the Giuliani effect has weakened, the beggars have started to return to the subway. A month or so ago a man came into my subway car, reporting to those that weren't wearing iPods, that he had been looking for a job for over 6 months to support his family. He finally found one, but, unfortunately, he needed to make an initial investment of 325 dollars to get started in this new "job".
I think one guy gave him a dollar just because it was a fairly novel approach to begging on the subway.
As ridiculous as it sounded, I felt in the back of my mind that maybe he really did need the money to buy a suit or something and that maybe he wasn't a crack head.
About two-weeks later I was riding the same subway at more-or-less the same time and the same dude comes into the car and gives the same lame sob story, except this time the initial investment is $285 dollars.
Either he just makes up these figures or he was making very slow progress.
Either way, I still didn't give him any money.

Boiled French Fries

My father, as I've mentioned before, is from a weird little country called Estonia. Sometimes kids whose ethnic backgrounds are different are a little ashamed or embarrassed to talk about it. I grew up in a neighborhood of New York City that was/is 80% Italian and everyone there was extremely proud of their heritage. They proudly went about their days wearing T-shirts with the Italian flag on them, driving cars with the red devil horn/chili pepper hanging from the rear-view, speaking that strangely American working-class Italian-English dialect whenever they ordered lunch meat. I was actually traumatized as a small child by the guys who worked in the deli across the street. My parents and/or grandmother used to send me there on a daily basis to buy things like American Cheese, salami, ham and bologna - those things were fine to order; but there were days when the menu of the house called for exotic things like "mozzarella" and "capacolla". If I pronounced the former the American way, as "MOTTS-A-RELLA" they guys in the deli would point at my five-year-old face and laugh at me.
"Ha! What do you want, kid? MOTTS-A-RELLA? Is that some kind of apple sauce?"
I would stand there humiliated while the other patrons looked at my little blond head and laughed in unison with the guys behind the deli counter.
I knew full well that I could go in there and say I wanted the cheese the way they wanted me to say it, which was/is - MUTS-A-DELL. If I had the personality I have now, then, I would have asked them, "what's that? A broken computer?" Of course, Dell didn't exist at that time, but it's just a supposition. I probably wouldn't even do it now anyway.
I always returned from the deli defeated. It got to a point where I could only order mozerella by brand name and the brand that I was able to pronounce tasted like window caulking - or what I would imagine caulk to taste like.
Capacolla was another issue. Thankfully, this was a rare order in my house but it was virtually impossible to pronounce the way they wanted me to in the deli. I think those goombas used to call it "Gabba-Gool" and I just refused to order this after a few humiliations in the deli. Much later in life, after I had been to Italy a couple of times, I realized how stupid all of these people were and got over my past traumas. These things take time sometimes. I no longer feel intimidated for the gumbas, just sorry. The cool thing is that they don't care. That's the good thing about goombas.

So, back to my weird Estonian heritage. I can't say that there's anything that's so different about my father's ways. I can only say that everything is almost completely different. He does everything his own way. There have been virtually no developments in his repetoir since he crossed the Atlantic through a hurricane in 1948.

As a child, I remember him laughig riotously at every joke he told - none of which made the least bit of sense when he translated them from standard English to his own version of English. He'd listen to jokes in the bar he hung out in after work and come back and tell my mother the thing - usually something highly inappropriate for family listening. The thing was it didn't matter because the joke was so mangled that it was no longer really dirty. We could tell that it was supposed to be a dirty joke but that my father had misunderstood it so completely that he lost the filth somewhere in there yet it still seemed to him to be a riot. My mother usually stopped listening after the part where "a naked woman walks up to a priest" and started planning her next pair of shoes in her head. "Oh, that was a good one, Elm", she'd say.

Well, that's dad. He was always surprising us with something.
Since mom hated to cook, he often gave it a whirl but it was almost always a waste of food. My brothers and sisters were older so they could just flat-out refuse to eat but I, as a small child, had to eat or at least pretend to eat whatever he put out on the table. I dreaded the days when he was in the mood to cook. I remember the fried steak that was cooked for about forty-five seconds, the canned string-beans that were cooked for forty-five minutes to the point of tastelessness, or the boiled french fries.
I remember the first time I saw the french fries sitting in a pool of tepid water.
"What's this?", I asked?
"French fries."
"What happened to them?"
"Just eat them. They're good."
"They look sick. Why are they in water?"
"I boiled them."
"Why?"
"We had no oil. Just sit and eat."
I passed on the fries.

Being a non-Italian was hard. Being half Estonian was harder at times. Life is not always so easy but really, why should your ethnic background be such a pain the the ass? At least growing up relieves some of the ass pain.

Diet 7-Up and the Cure for Borderline Diabetes

I was perched up on the Formica counter chatting with my brother Aldo and his eventual wife, Drucilla about Patrick Ewing's chances of being named rookie of the year when the smoke started turning the corner from the hallway to the kitchen.
We didn't give it much thought since we knew Gerty'd been boiling herself in the bath for the last three hours and this was the usual fallout from the pressure-cooked dousings she subjected herself to every evening after work.
She used to get the steam from the hot baths lodged so deeply into her pours that she'd sweat for about two hours after. She had to keep this giant turban-towel around her three-feet of hair to keep it appropriately moist for the next day so it would seem like she washed it in the morning rather than the day before. I'm sure between the wet mop of hair and the steam-filled pours of her body she weighed at least an extra 10 pounds when she finally slo-mo geysered out of the bathing chamber.
So, Aldo, Drucy and I were sitting around yaking it up when Gerty entered the kitchen for a her nightly water-guzzling ritual whereby she stood in front of the open fridge, removed a large soda-bottle filled with cold water and proceeded to suck down the contents until the bottle flattened into a great collapsed origami lung. Once the water was sufficiently expunged, she started searching through the refrigerator. For what? More water? That wasn't enough?
Aldo and I had kind of seen this routine before but Drucilla was new to this scene and kind of grossed out by the sight of my pruned-out bathrobe-wearing sweat-ball turbaned sister inhaling a half-gallon of water in six point five seconds, all the while not even acknowledging our existence though we were three feet in front of her.
Well, she hadn't acknowledged our existence until she realized that what she was looking for in the fridge was in fact, not there.
"What happened to my Diet 7-Up?", Gerty interrogated.
Aldo and I were kind of wrapped up in our conversation and Drucy was just sort of quietly observing the scene as if it she were not really in the room. Since we weren't all that interested in where her Diet 7-Up had gone, we didn't answer.
"Hello? Are you deaf? Where is my Diet 7-Up?"
"Ma must have drunk it", Aldo answered back.
"Well, I need it quickly or I might go into a diabetic coma."

Now, Aldo and I were not so cruel as to allow Gerty to go into a diabetic coma by simply denying her request. We denied her request because we didn't believe that she was going to go into a coma, nor did we accept that she was a borderline diabetic.
You might wonder how we could be so callous...Cruel even. But don't wonder. Just accept that Gerty was and is simply a bit of a sometimes-lovable and sometimes infuriating nutcase.

So, Aldo and I didn't respond at all.

"EJ, I need you to go and get me some Diet 7-Up right now."
"Gerty. It's almost 9. The deli is closing and I am in the middle of a conversation. So, I'm sorry but, no. You'll have to get dressed and go yourself."
"Do you understand that I'm a borderline diabetic and I could go into a hyperosmolar coma? I'm dehydrated and I need to balance out all the sugar I've been eating all day."
"And Diet 7-Up will somehow save you from going into a diabetic coma? Come on, Gerty. Do we look stupid to you?"
"Don't argue with me. I was a Phys-Ed major and I know a quite a few things about the human body, okay. Now, I need Diet 7-Up and I need it now so just go to the store and get it for me and stop being a jerk about it."
"No", was all I replied. Aldo started mocking her, "diet 7-up - like that's friggin insulin or something. Are you retarded?"
Drucilla was still silent, looking very uncomfortable.
Then we started chatting again, trying to ignore Gerty who by this time was on all-fours on the kitchen floor.
Drucy looked a little worried - like maybe it was time for her to go home - when Gerty held her head and let out this annoying moan that I suppose was intended to convince us that she was actually melting into a hyper-super-awesome-molar coma (or whatever it was called) and then she screatched out some words that were at-first hard to identify but which sounded something like, "ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" which loosely translated to 'if I don't get Diet 7-Up now I'm going to die!' and with that, I jumped off the counter and hiked the two blocks to Roma's deli to get her stupid Diet 7-Up-icilin.
I think when I got back, Drucilla was gone. I was sure she would never be back, but then Aldo must have convinced her that whatever Gerty had wasn't contagious, or maybe that Diet 7-Up really was a cure for dehydrated diabetics.

JUG

When I was in High School or, as I used to call it then, "prison", I was a fairly good kid. I mostly kept to myself, I mostly obeyed the rules and I usually displayed outward respect for my teachers and the school staff despite feeling that they were all a bunch of nacos.

Despite my calm and quiet, respectful demeanor, I was somehow thought to be a particularly dangerous problem for the Dean of Disciplin, Mr. Queery.
Queery was not so much a man as a robot.
Even his voice radiated the sickly mental dust from the reruns of Lost In Space on an old black and white rabbit-eared TV set. Since Queery was evil, he was more like a combination of the robot and Doctor Smith. He used to call to me with his robotic arm, gesturing for me to come to look at the clipboard in his hand so he could write my name on it.
"Mr. Sepp", he'd say as he looked at the clipboard. "You have JUG. Report to room 145 at 2:35."
"Why? What did I do?!"
"You're slacks are not proper dress slack material."
"These? These are so dress pants. I wear them all the time"
"Well, the you've been getting away with murder, Mr. Sepp. They are not regulation fabric."
"Yes. These pants are dress pants. You cannot tell me that they are not dress pants!"
"They are not dress pants, Mr. Sepp. If you keep arguing with me you will have two days of JUG".

I guess I deserved this JUG punishment. After all I was killing small African children by wearing non-standard-fabric Bill Blass dress pants to school.

JUG was rumored to stand for JUSTICE UNDER GOD and it was just a CARDINAL SPELLMAN word for 'detention'. It was a waste of an hour after school but at least I did some homework when I was there when they decided to let us do it. Sometimes doing anything was forbidden and we had to just sit at our desks with our hands folded neatly. JUG was, after all, a punishment for doing awful things like wearing bad fabric or not having our ties so tight that we couldn't breathe or letting our hair grow one milimeter below our shirt collars.
It's no wonder I was ADD when I literally spent every other day of my first year of High School in JUG doing nothing but staring at Sister Angelica's beard and wondering why she didn't get a Gillette Contour Plus razor and shave those suckers right off there. Maybe it was too embarassing to go to Duane Reade and ask for a man's razor when you were a nun. She could have dressed like a man or even taken off the habit and pretended to be a normal woman shopping for her husband. Of course the cashier would have noticed the beard and realized that this woman was actually buying the razor for herself.

Maybe she could have asked one of the other nuns to wax it for her in the convent loo. Then again, where would these convent nuns get the wax? Maybe they could make it. After all, don't nuns spend a lot of time in nature and have easy access to the common wax plant? Then again, these were city nuns - Bronx nuns. They probably don't know anything about making wax. So, I suppose she could send one of the non-bearded nuns to a beauty supply shop and have her buy a tub of wax with which to tear off her muttonchops. But then maybe it was too embarrassing for her to confide in any of the other nuns enough to send them on such a mission. Yet aren't all nuns supposed to be on a mission? Perhaps other kinds of missions.

You see where all this is going, don't you?

Exactly.

Mr. Queery will have a lot to answer for in the next life.

Why I Think it's Disturbing When People Accidentally Sit on Things that Get Lodged in their Ass

Okay, so I'm straying from my usual personal history today to get something off my chest.

A recent conversation I had with a radiologist has had the rusty wheels in my head doing quite a bit of spinning lately.

He told me about something that I had heard before but it was second-hand information so I took it less seriously. Now I feel I must speak out.

What really bothers me is that we live in a society where people regularly go to emergency rooms at various hospitals around the world complaining of stomach pain. Once they are x-rayed it is discovered that a large object such as a flashlight, a reading lamp, a cell phone or (most commonly) a vibrator has been lodged in the intenstine, most likely through the anus.

When asked how this object got into their intestines, most patients seem to answer that "they accidentally sat on it".

How, is the question that immediatly comes to the mind of the Radiologist, but is seldom asked. You see, we live in a society where people are okay with randomly sticking large electrical devices through the sphincter and subsequently losing them, but those same people will be offended if you ask them why they did that. So, they lie. They say they sat on them.

Now, even if I'm completely naked and reading a really engrossing novel or watching game seven of the NBA finals and it's in overtime, I don't think I'm going to accidentally sit on my umbrella (which is so oddly placed on my sofa as to be ready to penetrate my clenched sphincter) so hard that it will go up my ass and I'll lose it there. It just can't happen.

Of course, I might get e-mails from random readers who will insist that yes, indeed it is possible to sit on your cell phone and have it travel through your intestines. But I don't buy it. End of story. Even if you're "used to" having things shoved up your ass, a big Hello Kitty vibrator won't just slip in without you putting in a little effort.

Now as to why it bothers me so.

The fact is, there are a lot of problems going on in the world. People are dying in wars and famine. Cancer, AIDS, bird flu - countless diseases take lives every day. But there are people who have so little in their lives that they are sitting around their houses and apartments in big cities like New York - probably making more in a year than I will ever make in my lifetime - searching their dwellings for the biggest knickknack that can possibly fit through the anal orifice in the hope that it will give them some kind of pleasure.

I say these people need to be hurded like bored cattle and sent to Lebenon to stand at the frontlines and protect the innocent - take a grenade or two for some child who has nothing.
It would save insurance companies some money on patients who don't deserve coverage.

That brings to mind a good question: is that covered?

Sick All the Time

I'm sick today and I haven't entered anything for a while. I've been busy getting engaged and all that jazz. Anyway, I'm sick and have been reflecting on the fact that I have a crappy immune system and as it's my style to find ways to blame other people for any and all of my problems, I have decided it's my mother's fault that I am sick.

Why? How? Those are fair questions and I have the answers.

First off, my mother didn't breast feed me.

Need I say more?

My body lacks the antibodies to fight diseases! All because my mother was too shy to breastfeed! Oh, that upsets me.

I investigated by using the modern day bible, AKA, "the net" and found this:
"Human milk is baby's first immunization. It provides antibodies which protect baby from many common respiratory and intestinal diseases, and also contains living immune cells. First milk, colostrum, is packed with components which increase immunity and protect the newborn's intestines. Artificially fed babies have higher rates of middle ear infections, pneumonia, and cases of gastroenteritis (stomach flu). Breastfeeding as an infant also provides protection from developing immune system cancers such as lymphoma, bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease and celiac sprue, and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, all of which are related to immune system function. And breastfed babies generally mount a more effective response to childhood immunizations. In all these cases, benefits begin immediately, and increase with increasing duration of breastfeeding."

I am not sure what is more disturbing - the information that my mother has left me with a sub-par immune system of the part where it says "Breastfeeding as an infant also provides protection from developing immune system cancers..." which suggests that some might breasfeed as non-infants.

So there really is not "second off" as I don't think there is any more evidence that I need to present.

That being said, I don't really blame my mother for not breast feeding me. If I were a woman I would not want some baby sucking my tit either. It's just gross. If I can get it in a can, why the hell not get it in a can. Isn't that called progress?

So, now I think I might want to blame the scientific community for not better replicating breastmilk. Hell, with all the money being poured into research for every kind of crap you can think of, why can't they develop formulae that exceed the health benefits of natural breastmilk?

I blame society, the scientific community, the government, my teachers, the national parks department, and any organization that has ever received public funds.

Stupiditude

I believe I've mentioned before that I often thought of myself as a really intelligent retarded person. This was particularly true when I was in school. I often found myself unable to understand anything that was going on in my classes. Of course, now I realize it was simply because I wasn't paying attention to what the instructor was saying and when I read the books I usually was thinking about where I'd go if I had enough money to travel around the world.

My travel interest inspired me to think about how great it would be if I could become a photo journalist for National Geographic. I have never really read National Geographic, but I've often looked at the pictures. I like pictures. Especially the pretty ones. Pretty pictures make me happy.

I have no idea why, with this kind of mind that sometimes seems so limited, I have always had an attitude when it comes to my perceptions of other peoples' intelligence. I am immediatly annoyed by those I perceive to be below my intellectual level. Yet deep inside I know that my intellectual level is not so high. I constantly meet people who are probably smarter than me but I seem unable to believe it because often very smart people are not very polished in physical presentation, nor in verbiage. Though I have to point out here that I tend to think of "smart" people as those who are skilled in math and the sciences as I have no idea what the hell those people are talking about most of the time and so they seem like they have brains that work better than mine. At the same time I find them to be socially inept and look down on them anyway.

Then there's also this testing problem I seem to have developed around eleventh grade - you know - when standardized tests actually seem to matter. I had always done pretty well on them and then boom - I was statistically retarded. Was I simply psyching myself out? Did I have a brain aneurysm in my sleep which killed a bunch of my smart cells? Am I an idiot for thinking that an aneurysm could have done that? Do I want to do the research involved to find out? Is my increasing laziness a symptom of my decreasing perspicacity? Am I being pretentious when I use words like 'perspicacity'? Does that word even exist? Do you think I'm even interested in finding out? Maybe. I like words. I'm not always sure how to use them but I like to try.

I've always liked words and sentences and how things sound and look. I assume that there is some kind of nearly useless intelligence there but sadly we live in a world that values test scores and statistics. I find that to be very annoying and it forces me to concluded that we live in a world run by idiots - even if they are good at math and scored 1300 or more on their SATs.
What really pisses me off is that those bastards are getting all the high-paying jobs.

Live Slow, Die Old

I think this is a much better way to live. So far that's the way things are going for me and I'm pretty happy with it.
I hope to be about 99 before I die. I like the number 99.

That chick on Get Smart was pretty hot.

Skinny but hot.

Yeah. I'll take my time dying. Chillin'. Livin'. Tuning in to what it be. Hopefully.