Posts tagged as:

I watch a lot of tv

My cat is a bad influence and other reasons why I’m going to have him arrested

March 26, 2011

Up until a month ago, this was the closest thing to a cat that I had:

Pillow cat

But now, I have a real cat that purrs and everything. And when I feed him, it actually goes in his mouth instead of just falling from the pink stitching and hitting the floor. Sorry, pillow cat, you’ve been replaced.

When I brought real cat home from the SF SPCA, he almost immediately started suckling pillow cat.

At first I thought, “Okay, it’s a new environment for him and he was a stray who was likely taken from his mother at an early age. Normal enough.” But he kept at it. And then he left a large wet stain on it and even though I was totally over pillow cat, part of me didn’t want to face the possibility that maybe I was the one who had been dumped.

Real cat (Frisco)

Things didn’t get much better from there. Frisco spent most of his day on a towel rack in my closet. The only exceptions were normal cat things like eating, making me feel inferior in every way possible and of course, a quickie with pillow cat. And there I was in the background – out of focus and watching from afar.

I was jealous of a pillow and he knew it. I think it fueled him. Because as soon as I decided to stop pulling him away from the pillow to pet him or ask him what he thought about my outfit, he began to wean himself. He started sitting in my lap, following me around the house and (slowly) accepting my presence. He actually liked me. Maybe.

However, this is also around the time when he started prompting me to Google things like “Xanax for cats” and “Is NyQuil safe for cats if only using half a cap?” Being off the synthetic tit changed him. He started staying up for most of the night and playing with all sorts of cables. But he only really focused on the ones connected to the things I love the most – the TV and my computer. He nearly knocked an entire cup of cranberry juice on my keyboard and made numerous attempts to push my laptop off the desk. He sits in front of the TV right as I’m trying, for the third time, to figure out why Ron and Sam are fighting. He chews on my headphones. He tries to interrupt anything I do that doesn’t involve napping with him.

I distracted him from what he loves and now he’s doing the same to me. I’m in a codependent relationship with my cat. When he’s not sitting near me, he perches himself in a place where he can watch me. Sometimes, like right now, he drifts off to sleep and I’m able to get online.

But once he figures out how to disable the router, I’m fucked.

 

{ 6 comments }

Bridalplasty: It’s even worse than it sounds

November 30, 2010

Nothing makes me more nauseous than the thought of planning, paying for and starring in my own wedding. I bet it’s really similar to the feeling Richard Branson gets when he thinks about poor people. But I betray myself because even though I don’t want a $5,000 dress, gardenia centerpieces or a jazz band, I love to watch people who do. It’s fascinating to me what women will pay for and put up with just to create their perfect day. A perfect day that really just ends up being an amalgam of thousands of other perfect days all involving a white dress, average food and a totally wacky DJ who probably ends up sobbing into his cumber-bun when he gets home.

So when I found out that E! was combining two of the most potent emotional and financial handicaps for women – plastic surgery and weddings – I couldn’t help myself. Well, actually I think I probably forgot about it two buttery minutes into an episode of Paula’s Home Cooking. But, thankfully, what the E! channel lacks in quality, ingenuity and talent, they make up for in repeats. So, even though I missed the premiere of Bridalplasty, I still had the opportunity to see it up to four more times since it first aired.

It follows the typical reality show format of a premiere episode: show the contestants circle around like golden retrievers trying to find the cutest (pinkest) bedroom, cut away to talking heads ranging from heartwarming to you must be internally freeze-dried, and of course, a washed up almost celebrity, Shanna “my mother was deaf” Moakler.

But Bridalplasty brings quite a few extras. Self esteem issues are in such abundance they’re almost not worth talking about. It’d be like analyzing the different glasses they drank out of. Most are so convinced of their repulsiveness that they spontaneously break into tears, all are adamant that they need to be the perfect bride (in other words, someone else completely) before getting married and some are probably just there because Bret Michaels wasn’t casting for anything at the time.

I mean, it has to be a joke. It just has to. It is, in every sense, a parody of itself. And if it didn’t revolve around a dozen women voluntarily having their noses broken and nipples sewn back on, I’d insist that it was.

After they mark their beds with Curious by Britney Spears, they head into the living room. While there, they’re introduced to plastic surgeon, Dr. Dubrow, who expresses his shock that they’re all “basically good looking.” After his backhanded compliment, he is then seen drawing on the women as if he’s playing a frenetic game of Pictionary, only no one is pretending to have fun.

And just to ensure that their self image plummets to an all time low, the women have their consultation videos shown on the flat screen for all to see. Almost immediately, horror washes across their faces as they hear things like “extra fatty tissue” and “areolas pointing downward.”

After a “Fuck it, I’m getting liposuction” meal packed with alcohol and cream sauce, they launch into their first competition. It requires Ike Turner’s most eligible bachelorettes to, once again, stare at photos of their frowning stomachs and race to solve a computer generated puzzle of themselves after their plastic surgery. However, once they finish their fifteen minutes as a lab rat, it’s obvious to anyone with at least one cataract-free eye that all of the improved bodies have been whittled down to a uniform size 2. Despite this, most of the women reveal that they want to look exactly like that for their wedding.

As a reward for those who complete their puzzles, there’s an injectable party. An injectable party. Where Dr. Dubrow and his staff (boom mic operators with nothing else to do) inject things into their faces. They’re all really excited until they have to vote off one of their own emotionally crippled cohorts. They feign tears and ultimately send home one of only two non-white women, who was perceived as selfish because she pawned her engagement ring in order to make a car payment.

It ends with Shanna remarking to the eliminated contestant that, “Your wedding will still go on, it just may not be perfect.”

My thoughts exactly, ladies.

{ 8 comments }

Bubblegum Infused Vodka or How to Be an Industrious Drunk

June 1, 2010

I bought a gallon of vodka a few days ago. It was $9.99 at Trader Joe’s – where they’ll sell you a rib-eye for the price of an onion. I mean, I’ll probably never drink a gallon of vodka in my lifetime, but the bargain was too hard to pass up. I’d buy a prostate exam for the right price. The best part? It comes in a plastic jug, which I figure should be the standard for any hard liquor. Glass rarely mixes with rowdynness anyway.

I happen to like flavored vodka because many of them tend to me more Skittle than they are alcohol. And if you really want to twist my arm, when I say “flavored vodka” I actually mean, “wine coolers.” The differences are negligible as far as I’m concerned since they both end with me talking about how I always confuse The Mighty Ducks with Darkwing Duck but what if they are secretly the same thing?

So while I’m far from being a mixologist, I do know how to put things in other things. And with that, I’ve essentially shared my recipe for Bubblegum Vodka. I used 16 pieces of Dubble Bubble for about 1.5 cups of vodka and shook it around every couple hours. With every shake I thought to myself, “This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. Even worse than that time you Naired your eyebrows.” For the full 24 hours that I let it steep, I felt like an idiot. A cheap idiot. But after tasting the final product I was like, holy shit this actually works. Oh, and there are even leftover bubblegum soaked vodka bombs. They act in kind of the same way as olives in a gin martini but, you know, edible.

My finished product ended up being a disappointing pale pink. To get closer to Barbie’s convertible I added some red decorating sugar, which also made it a bit more like Fun Dip. Just how I like it.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the rest of this vodka. Using it to make homemade NyQuil seems too obvious.

{ 4 comments }

So it’s about this guy who…

May 20, 2010

I get three types of mail. Hey what kind of conditioner do you use because I’m going to the store right now and I’d like to get the same kind to use on my pubes, Hey I like your site and Hey do you get paid to write because you should.

The last type always surprises me the most. Probably because it’s not followed by, “Pics for trade?” But also because these kinds of emails usually come from people who are not only employed, but work in fields directly or indirectly relating to professional writing.

Which is why I was in Los Angeles the first week of May. The trip was 95% networking and 5% thinking about whether the smog or billboards plastered with Paris Hilton and her English bulldog would kill me. Turned out to be neither and was instead two Irish coffees that almost sent me into oncoming traffic on Sunset Blvd. This is why I don’t drink.

I stayed in Hollywood and had the difficult task of choosing a hotel that wasn’t either a methadone clinic or the place where Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose. The only reason I had the patience for such a challenge is that I needed to be within walking distance of my meetings since I was adamant about not renting a car. Mostly because I’ve busted three side mirrors on my Jeep and don’t trust a car that isn’t built like a Transformer, but also because I didn’t want to deal with traffic or Mel Gibson’s drunk driving. This meant that I ended up being sandwiched in between Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and what looked to be a drag version of Marilyn Monroe. Actually, it wasn’t until I began my whiskey -fueled trip back to my hotel that I noticed I was walking over the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It finally hit me why, for the past two days, crowds kept hovering over the ground to take photos of this seemingly unremarkable marble sidewalk that served mostly as a break dancing platform for a guy dressed in a cheap Elmo costume. I also realized that growing up around Disney World and their penchant to recreate miniature landmarks of everything under the sun so you never have to experience anything for yourself ever has warped me into thinking that authenticity is just another fictional character from Fantasia.

Luckily, I wouldn’t care if Tom Cruise and his star were sent to a refinement plant and never heard from again. At the time, all I was concerned about was getting my Baja Fresh quesadilla back safely to my room so I could sober up and think about how the last few days were holding a mirror to my shameful inexperience and hapless lack of direction.

Hollywood, despite its impastoed landscape of self expression, left me feeling intensely self conscious. It’s not something I experience often, only because I am usually too oblivious to be insecure. But subtlety does not exist in Hollywood. It wasn’t an environment I could easily slip into and, because I knew nothing about writing a spec or working up from donut coordinator to staff writer , I couldn’t help but feel that I was sweating ignorance. I concede that most, if not all, of my problem most likely had to do with the false assumption that there was even something to know or get. As if having some sort of carnal knowledge of this place meant that I was entitled to a story arc involving an instant rise to success and years later, a spot on some sort of celebrity rehab or weight loss reality show. But that’s irrelevant anyway, since being a writer only really gets you noticed if you’re dead or cook up something about vampires.

My meetings largely resembled the course of a blind date. They even involved the obligatory, “So tell me about yourself.” The script was almost always the same – I’d talk about moving around a lot, majoring in Art History and having to nearly be forced into writing. Then I’d respond that, no, it’s not really that weird to me that I don’t have a hometown,  joke about my useless major so they didn’t have to feel bad about secretly coming to that conclusion on their own and try to make, ‘My boyfriend encouraged me and nearly demanded that I start writing’ sound a little less Ike Turner-esque. That was easy enough. But when it came to what I actually wanted to do, I began questioning why I even came to LA in the first place. No matter how many times I was asked, my first thought was always, “I want to write. I want to make people laugh.” And since writing for TV requires a bit more than child-like optimism, my answer never seemed to be well received. Even when the person I was delivering it to had been drinking. And while I wasn’t necessarily thrilled with it either, it was marginally better than sitting there and attempting to motorboat myself.

My pity party didn’t last long, though. In between picking through a congealed bowl of queso and flipping through the channels to find the most ridiculous direct response product (Cami Secret won), I stumbled upon Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 on HBO. I hadn’t seen it, but I was familiar with the legend of these pants. Not only were they vintage, but they also fit four lifelong friends perfectly, despite their different measurements. The pants also bring good luck in the form of cute boys and really, is there any other good luck to be had?

So, while I’m working toward a future that isn’t quite clear to me yet, I have the think that if there’s room for story about a pair of pants that can form to any ass and still manage to assist in unveiling what really matters in life, then I figure there’s room for me, too.

{ 7 comments }

The iPad is the most exciting thing to happen to me since the Reese’s Big Cup

April 7, 2010

In 1999, I just kind of assumed that once 2000 rolled around, the future would ride in on its flying car and change everything. Of course, I didn’t think it would happen in the first month – I wasn’t a complete moron. I gave it at least two or three years, knowing that moving sidewalks don’t build themselves overnight. But the funny thing about the future is that it never truly arrives. It just kind of happens gradually, like weight gain. It’s embarrassing that it took me nearly two decades to untie myself from the idea that one day I’d wake up to discover everyone wearing the same silver jumpsuit and the only recognizable thread of my outdated life is that everyone still hates Michael Bolton.

I had no real reason for believing that the years in front of me would welcome a technological renaissance prepared to boast more than the transition of cassette tapes to compact discs. And since this sensationalized future that I created mostly from early morning viewings of The Jetsons wasn’t coming to fruition, I was soon disappointed. It was tip-toeing through progress, when I expected it to sprint. Eventually, I struck a balance between defeated realism and the fact that by 2004, I could take pictures with a cell phone.

It easily produced the worst photos I’ve ever seen. So grainy and blurry that a rough sketch was usually preferable. But I still thought it was probably the coolest thing a phone would ever do. I mean, this phone could make calls almost anywhere, take pictures and produce a pretty convincing MIDI version of ‘Für Elise.’ Of course, I thought I’d be flying by that time, but I couldn’t even fathom how it could get better than this.

Until about two years later, when I got a phone capable of capturing video. Holy shit. I didn’t even know what kind of sorcery was going on over at Samsung, but surely this was the stopping point for any hand-held technology. It could record video of such quality that sometimes you could even tell whether or not your subject was bipedal. You could also access the internet, or at least some parody of it. But my awe soon wore off because while it was definitely a step in the right direction, it was also the technological equivalent of flame decals on an Astrovan. I was especially unimpressed with its aptitude once I upgraded my 3rd generation iPod to one capable of video, what is now referred to as the iPod Classic. Granted, it couldn’t record video, but my phone hardly could either. This offered crisp non-Big Foot-esque video playback. With colors actually occurring in nature.

After that it was the iPod Touch, iPhone and now, the iPad. In each case, the successor instantly neutered what came before it – making something just several months older seem at home in a time capsule with L.A. Gears, Ace of Base tapes, and Jaleel White. My iPod Touch is solid for music, but not much else. Thanks to AT&T, my iPhone barely even functions as a phone. But on my iPad I can read books. I can even create little reminders for myself in something that looks like a regular .79 legal pad but is actually just a gluttonous display of poorly directed funds.

Once I opened the box and reacted to its very satisfying but obviously first generation heft, I was overcome with a sadness that can only be fueled by regret. I remembered my family’s first computer – a Dell desktop that had to weigh at least 86 pounds, manufactured in 1998. When I sat in front of it the first time, I felt overwhelmed. It seemed to eclipse me in size three times over, but that didn’t matter because I could do almost anything. I stacked my music collection to a staggering 92 songs. I had my own email address. I could even spend countless hours playing my only computer game – The Simpsons: Virtual Springfield. I felt guilty that after a few years, I simply discarded it and sought out more portable, but mediocre, alternatives. The iPad, however, doesn’t overheat or require 22 different kinds of cables and for those reasons alone, I find myself unable to romanticize that monolith of a computer.

Eventually, the 9.7 inch display will become as antiquated as the 1.6 inch display that all of my awful flip phones shared. One day, the iPad will suck, too. But right now, I have over 6,000 songs, two email addresses and, well, that Simpsons game was kind of lame anyway. The only thing it can’t do is assist me in coming up with a description that doesn’t live in a basement of uninspired, expletive-laced statements.

Seriously though, it’s really fucking cool.

{ 3 comments }

← Previous Entries