the pieces of my life

A quick trip to the bookstore during lunch revealed a lovely display of Valentine’s Day books. On a big table right in the front, there was a sign to the effect of “Presents for Your Valentine.” And what are the hot books for lovers? Well, prominently placed were How to Dump a Guy (A Coward’s Manual), Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid: The Serial Monogamist’s Guide to Love, How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days: The Universal Don’ts of Dating (a book with a stick figure per page doing things such as asking a guy if she’s fat, lying about missing a period, and calling his friends for relationship advice), and Dumped: An Anthology. Is it just me or does it seem the romance has gone out of dating? This is what passes for Valentine’s Day? This should be on a table under a sign that reads “Bitter About Love.” And while I’m here, let me say that it’s moronic what gets published these days. There’s Even God Is Single, So Stop Giving Me A Hard Time, a picture book of all the reasons (twenty-six to be exact) why single is good. Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept. But a picture book? How about a web site instead. Or a comic book. And then there are Love Coupons, for those too inane to come up with their own nice things to do for their mates. Puh-lease! How hard is it to draw a pretty picture and write “Back rub on demand.” And then there is a book–and hell if I can remember the name–that is verbatim–verbatim, I tell you–from an e-mail that went around years and years ago on what every woman should have/know by the time she’s thirty. It was exactly the same as that e-mail! I’ve got a folder full of old e-mail forwards that I’d be happy to publish under my name. What is up with the publishing industry? Geez!

Sang sent me an interesting article about the abortion issue. I confess I didn’t read the entire sixty-seven pages, but the gist of it is that the crime rate fell roughly eighteen years after the legalization of abortion. It states, “Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime,” which blatantly contradicts what the commentary on NPR had said. (Interestingly, it’s the “sharpest drop in murder rates since the end of Prohibition in 1933.” So what is that saying? Give the people booze and free sex and they’re content enough to not kill?) Basically, fewer young males in the highest-crime areas leads to fewer crimes. While this makes perfect sense, something about this theory rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it’s the implications? That women in high-crime areas should be discouraged from having kids? There’s a leap there to sterilizing women on welfare that makes me too uncomfortable. It’s too Gattaca for me. I think I’d better read the entire report.

Me and the Big Mac, we both turn 35 this year. I don’t know why I find that depressing, but I do.

My play-by-play commentary:

The Buccaneer fans don’t look even the tiniest bit menacing. The Raider fans, though, are not ones you’d want to meet in a dark alley. By fandom alone, this game is the Raiders.

Celine Dion is singing “God Bless America.” Do you think the organizers don’t know that she’s Canadian? And that no one likes her? (And don’t give me any crap about Canada being part of the Americas. Irrelevant here.)

How cool would it be if, as the players introduced themselves and said what colleges they went to, they also said what their GPAs were?

The Osbourne’s Diet Pepsi commercial hands down the best of the night.

Does anyone really care who wins this game?

Melissa Rivers has done the unbelievable: sunk to new levels with Help, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, a celebrity survivor show, which apparently, has done well in the U.K.

“There isn’t any fire, there’s no emotion. I mean these guys are fighting for the championship of the world.” Um, yeah. If by “championship” you mean “the single sport of football” and by “world” you mean “the self-absorbed United States.”

Why are car commercials so boring. Isn’t there anything interesting they can say about a car? Yawn.

Do you think Jon Gruden is sitting there on the sideline calling out, “Hey, anyone want a little time in the Super Bowl? You can play on the winning team. You, water boy? Wanna play? Yo, Brad? Your mother want to get in this game?” How much are advertisers bumming that a lot of people have already flipped the channel.

Who do you have to sleep with to get to be a Dial-a-Down guy at the Super Bowl? More specifically, who do I have to sleep with to be a Dial-a-Down guy at the Super Bowl?

How much longer until reality TV does a sports show? And I’m not talking about the police report on the 11 o’clock news.

“The Raiders are clearly back in the game.” Yeah, but the viewers aren’t and the advertisers are screwed anyway. They should’ve just stayed in the game from the beginning.

I miss the Bud Bowl.

Apparently it wasn’t all that clear to the Raiders that they were back in the game. Whoops.

I guess you can’t judge a team by its fans. Game’s over. And I still don’t care.

So apparently I spew out a weekend’s worth of blog, and then have nothing else to say? Well, that’s not exactly it. What’s happened this week is I got all fired up about things when I’m nowhere near a computer, and then by the time I return, I can’t recapture the original angst. For instance, on the 22nd, I was burning about the NPR commentary from a formerly pro-choice person (although the rebuttal had me feeling better). The interesting thing about both commentaries is that they came from angles I wasn’t really expecting. The anti view was that child abuse hasn’t gone down and that women feel like they have no choice; they will get family and boyfriend/husband support for abortions but not for raising a child. The pro side took a strictly medical view: she’s a neonatal nurse who has spent too much time watching horribly sick babies suffer and die. My passion for this issue is strong, but my desire to rant about it right now is not, so consider yourself lucky to not have gotten an earful (eyeful?) of my pro-choice views. I think I’m just too tired, because Adam’s got some sort of cough that kept me up all night. Which is another thing I could rant about: how as wonderful as marriage is, sometimes it’s nice to have a bed to yourself. I could also rant that we had to reclaim our garbage can from our neighbors who took it (as Adam said, “Does it get any more suburban cliche than that?” Actually, he mangled what he said, but that’s what he meant). I could rant about the fact that we need a new car (in this weather, Adam’s heat works only intermittently, and things seem to just keep falling off). I could rant that work went from snail’s pace to slammed, but I don’t write about work here. I could go on for a while about how much I just do not care about this year’s Super Bowl, because the idiot Dolphins blew it, and how much I really don’t care about the Oscars, because I haven’t seen any of the movies that are going to be nominated. I could rant… well, actually I couldn’t. Because it’s time for me to get myself to work. Rant averted.

I know it’s incredibly trite to talk about the weather, but I can’t help it! What is with this state? Today’s temperature is practically balmy compared tonight. Today is high of 20 degrees, low of 5 degrees. But tonight–when I have my sewing class and I can’t just go straight home and climb into my super warm bed–it’s going to be a high of 0 degrees and a low of -5 degrees with a wind chill temperature of -25 degrees! No joke! They said it every five minutes on NPR this morning. This is supposed to last the week, until Sunday, when temperatures may hit 30. Give me the rain any day. (According to Yahoo MA weather, it’s currently 13 degrees but “it feels like -5.” I’m thinking of canceling my afternoon interview… I wish!) Okay, hopefully that will be my last weather rant for a good long time, although I can’t make any promises.

I’m not sure why we don’t go to New York more often. It was four hours door-to-door from our house to the Bear’s apartment, including stops for gas and food. Very doable. Parking in the city was a breeze–got a spot just across the street from her apartment. She and Dave have a magnificent apartment for New York: high ceilings, lots of light, and elevator in the building. The rooms are big and they’ve decorated them with just that Claire and Dave flair, so it’s all great fun. They made us waffles and coffee to fortify us for our New York adventure.

First stop was the American Museum of Natural History where we watched the Harrison Ford-narrated planetarium show, The Search for Life: Are We Alone. Of course, Harrison Ford annoys me (he was incredibly snippy to me during an interview I did with him for Amazon), but getting over that, I just love planetarium shows and they really could be about anything and I’d be happy. I know Adam really enjoyed it as well: he said it was one of the best movie naps he’s ever had. We watched the Big Bang theory and checked out the relative sizes display, although half of it was lost on me as it would said, “If Hayden’s Sphere is the size of your brain, this model is the size a raindrop would be,” and I didn’t figured out that Hayden Sphere was the big round planetarium starring me in the face. After a while, I declared I was bored by outer space, so the four us tooled about the museum, getting goofy over the stuffed animals. As Adam says, there will never be another museum created like this one again, since shooting animals and stuffing them for our pleasure is kind of frowned upon these days. Oddly enough, all the primates have a look of surprised fear on their faces. Wonder why? The best part of the museum for me was a photograph exhibition called “Beneath the Antarctic,” of a diving expedition. Incredible views.

The rest of the evening was spent hitting the Hi Life bar, then dinner at Max Soho, a game of Apples to Apples (and if you’ve never played this, which I hadn’t, it is a really fun game if you’ve got a warped enough group, which obviously enough we did), and finally back to another bar, the Ding Dong. Adam and I called it an early night (what else?) and headed back for some sleep.

Funny thing, walking into the Ding Dong, I was reminded that New York places all have this incredibly identifying smell. The bars have this vaguely smokey, woody smell to them. The apartment buildings have the odor of a melange of foods being cooked at once. The clothing stores often have a slightly moldy scent. My nose alone brings back so many New York memories.

I wonder sometimes if I could live in New York again. Picturing myself there takes a bit of work. I love how much there is to do. I love how convenient everything is. The subway makes getting from point A to point B a snap, as it’s a much more extensive system than it is here in Boston. Of course, the flip side of that is that sometimes it’s nice to just get in a car and go, and not have to deal with waiting for a train or walking to a subway stop in the bitter cold (and I just heard that they’re raising the subway fares from $1.50 to $2, which is pretty criminal, if you ask me). The dirt and the noise I can live with. The biggest stumbling block, I think, is where to live. When I was 24, living in a tiny box with a loft bed and no closets and only the occasional mouse (although the cockroaches were regulars) was fun and cool and made me feel independent and oh-so grown-up. At 34, it’s not so fun and cool, and really, I’m a little sick of the independent and grown-up bit. Seriously, though, having a lot of space is a priority for me. Having my own office makes me incredibly happy. A kitchen that can fit two people cooking together is not something I like to think of as a luxury. But in New York it is. You can have that if you live outside of the city, but then, you wouldn’t be living in New York. All things to contemplate as Adam evaluates what kind of job he wants to take.

Headed downtown on Sunday morning to stow our belongings at the Tweedle Twirp’s and then met an old buddy at Benny’s Burritos for lunch. Tweeds was right: Benny’s just isn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t bad, but nothing like it was. By the time we were done with lunch at 1, Tweeds was fully awake, so out we went for some shopping. Unfortunately, my primary destination, Industrial Plastics, was closed, but we managed to do some damage at Canal Jeans, which is closing its humongous store on Broadway this week. (This feels like the end of an era for me. I outfitted myself primarily from Canal Jeans when I was New Yorker. My first winter coat came from its vintage section. All my black tops were from the five and ten dollar bins. My cute purple-flowered vintage dress was a Canal Jeans special. Of course, Balducci’s also closed this past week, but without the fanfare of Canal Jeans. Well, unless you count security guards escorting the employees out, although I read they were all offered jobs in other markets–the employees, that is, not the security guards. Not that I’ve shopped at Balducci’s more than twice in my life, if even that much, but it was nice to know it was there.) We got in on the second to last day for a bit o’ shopping at Canal Jeans. Adam loaded up on 501s, whereas I found a lovely vintage, faux-fur-collared cream colored coat for a mere $15. I will look stylin’ in that thing. Grabbed a couple of tops, and off we went. Visited Pearl Paint (for Martha supplies), and wandered in and out of stores, checking out the tres hip boutiques of NoLita, which I have major problems accepting as an actual area. When one section of town becomes too Gapped out (like Soho), they just invent a new one for the ten-foot-by-twelve-foot closets they call stores.

Of course, the trip wouldn’t be complete without a visit to the new minimalist Prada store in what was part of the Guggenheim Soho. (Is it just me or is the Prada site a little minimalist itself?) I think more gawkers than shoppers were in there, but I guess they expect that with such a design. A trippy store that words won’t do justice. I was ogling a pair of shoes that I thought were quite fetching but the Tweedle Twirp wouldn’t let me get them because the heels were too high and Adam wouldn’t let me get them because they cost $3,240. But they were purty.