Pietro Bembo: Secure in both his masculinity and his spirituality?

I take pride in the strange search terms that are often used to find my blog.  I want to stencil them on a wall or stitch them into a throw pillow, and then use them as physical proof that I am, in fact, strange.  Maybe I don’t need to prove that.  It’s kind of a strange impulse to feel the need to prove one’s strangeness–in the same way that some people go to extreme lengths to prove their manhood by buying big fancy cars or shooting big fancy guns. 

Anyway, someone typed “how money is a red cardinal bird worth”, and ended up here.  First of all, I like the omission of the word “much”.  And I also like that someone is trying to sell a “red cardinal bird”–so specific!  Had they just said “cardinal”, then someone may have thought they were trying to sell the female variety which is more of a brownish color, OR someone may have thought they were thinking of auctioning off a senior ecclesiastical official in the Catholic Church.  Personally, I think birds are way more attuned to God than oh, say, Pietro Bembo over here.  And therefore, an all-around better investment. 

Cardinals aside, the only other noteworthy search terms of late have been “vagina” (still) and “Gary Busey”.  I guess I also take pride in being inane.

Gary Busey and other studs

It’d stand to reason (and I’d really prefer) to have “Man In The Mirror”,”Rock With You”  or another MJ song stuck in my head, but instead, for intermittent days on end, I’ve had the 1988 Poison classic “Nothin’ But A Good Time” in there.   

I think it started after Bret Michaels nearly died while performing at the Tony Awards a month ago.  I catch myself humming the chorus over and over.  Then I’ll stop, take a moment to figure out what song that is, realize what song that is, and rack my brain over why it has grabbed a song by that walking infection of a man and refuses to let go.  Eventually I give up and decide that I’ll stop pressing the issue and just ignore it–praying that this won’t be the time that the red bumps form.

Keeping with the graphic imagery, earlier tonight I had an exciting revelation about Gary Busey.  Conan had Kevin Connolly of “Entourage” (a show I don’t really watch) as a guest.  Connolly recounted the time when Busey guest starred and proceeded to chase him around the set, catch him, hold him down, and tickle him.  After the interview I realized that Busey and one of the contestants on this season of “The Bachelorette” (a show I make a sad, conscious effort to watch) share similar features.  Not just any contestant, but my favorite contestant–Michael.  He got kicked off already, but he’s a break dancing instructor who apparently lives, like, two minutes from my apartment.  Now that Jillian has sent him home it is clear to me that I need to get my hands on his address, sit on the curb across from his door, hold a red rose boutonniere, and hum the choruses of 80s hair band tunes to myself until he notices me.  It doesn’t matter that he looks like a younger version of an infamous Hollywood mad man–all that matters is that his apartment is potentially within walking distance to mine so that I never have to stay the night after we bang.  I mean…stay the night after we watch Lethal Weapon and floss our teeth.  Because that’s what people who look like this have no other choice but to do:

A few more years, a few more kilos--it'll be effin uncanny.

Adventures with radical bird folk

June 13th was the day of a significant occasion, yet one that I was unaware of until the last minute.  I came dangerously close to missing it, which would have been a tragedy because the occasion was…  National Pigeon Day. 

And no, it’s not just an arbitrary day for pigeon lovers to come together and make noise about feeding regulations and building spikes that prevent nesting (though there was that).  June 13th commemorates the death of Cher Ami, a homing pigeon that saved 200 lives while serving with the 77th Division of the U.S. Army in France during World War I.

Pigeons are fierce, man.  So fierce that there are falcon nests installed atop the Tappan Zee Bridge to scare away the winged things and the rust and ruin inducing droppings they bring.  Come on.  That’s something.  Can your poop bring down a feet of engineering?

Anyway.  It really was a cool thing and I’ve been meaning to mention it and I’ve especially been meaning to share a couple photos I took at the Central Park event.  It was like I had been a lonely religious zealot for years and suddenly I had found a group as fanatic as I.  Or maybe much more fanatic…

The life of the party (and the subject of my dreams, now and forever).

UNTIL the hen showed up.

Requiring and reveling in all the attention.

From humans and canines alike. That whore.

As much as I felt a kinship to the people at the event, part of me didn’t know if my breed of pigeon loving was the same as theirs.  It’s like, I’m perfectly content admiring and contemplating them from a park bench, but I’m not sure that’s enough if I truly want to be accepted into the National Pigeon Day group. 

My love is more passive, I guess.  I like carrying a tote bag with a pink pigeon screened on its side.  I like reading books about them. And of course singing along to lyrics that mention them (Ben Folds’ “Annie Waits”: Annie sees her dreams / Friday bingo, pigeons in the park; Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”: There’s pigeons down in market square / she’s standing in her underwear).

So, in conclusion, pigeons make me happy, I love them, but I’ve yet to wave an angry poster as their advocate at City Hall or boycott a supermarket that tries to keep them from calling the “O” or “A” in their neon sign home.  We’ll see.

By the way–there’s totally a link to my pictures here, on the organization/holiday’s blog, which brings me way more joy than is normal or healthy (qualities no one should strive for, anyway).

Horoscopes, Conspiracies, and “Udder” Stuff

Is this not the least useful horoscope you’ve ever read:

Sometimes you have to dry clean your dry cleaning and hand-wash your hand-washables.

Where’s the profound astrological meaning in that?  Is this some archaic saying homemakers used once upon a time?  i.e. Sometimes you have to pick your battles?  Sometimes you have pay extra to have someone else take care of the shit that you can’t do yourself because you would ruin it, and sometimes you have to buckle down, use some elbow grease and wash your fucking linens.  You made your bed and now you’re gonna lie in it–so long as you hand-washed the embroidered pillowcases and sent the down feather comforter to the dry cleaners first, young lady!

With a little tweaking that bit of wisdom courtesy of Yahoo! Horoscopes could sell a bunch of Dryel (the at-home dry cleaning product).  If I were a copywriter it would go a little something like this:

Sometimes you have to hand-wash your hand-washables, but who says you have to dry clean your dry cleaning?

Isn't this guy hilarious? I don't know what he has to do with Dryel, but he comes up when you do an image search for it. I'm going to name him Dreyfus. Dreyfus the Dryel guy.

 Also, bizarrely, Dryel’s website may, according to Google, harm your computer!  Get a load of this(!!!):

 What is the current listing status for dryel.com?

Site is listed as suspicious – visiting this web site may harm your computer.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 10 time(s) over the past 90 days.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 63 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 16 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-06-11, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-06-11.

I call foul on the dry cleaners of the world who are clearly conspiring to tarnish Dryel’s spotless reputation. Perhaps Dreyfus will put a stop to this.  Though I’m no homemaker, I posit that this is a battle worth choosing.

Glenn Beck: Phantom of the HDTV

Something terrifying just happened.  I was sitting alone in the living room in my parent’s house.  Typing out an article for an upcoming deadline.  Down the hall my dad was listening to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack on repeat.  “The Deadliest Catch” was playing on the TV, but I wasn’t particularly watching it.  I was engrossed in writing.  And then, I looked up from my laptop, and all of a sudden, the station had changed inexplicably from Discovery to…Fox News.  From rough and tumble crab fishermen in the Bering Sea, to this decidedly different breed of man:

Turns out my dad records Beck, who he says "Has his act together," daily on the DVR. Resulting in his showing up unwelcome in my afternoon. Sigh.

Drinking malt beverages, pickin’ up hos–you know, just another Saturday night.

Do you ever take a moment to reflect upon what you’re doing at any given time and find yourself thinking things like, “Wow.  I never thought I’d find myself spending a year in Malawi with the Peace Corps!”  Or, “This is absolutely insane.  I’m about to sign my name on this release form at which point network executives will have full authority to edit everything I do and say for the next four months however they maliciously see fit in order to procure the highest ratings.”   

My moment came about ten minutes ago as I was readying my camera to take a photograph of the banana bread I’d just baked, a photograph that I would then e-mail to my mom along with a message saying something along the lines of, “Look what I did on my Saturday night!”  So, yeah.  I realized that I’m swiftly turning not into the extremely cool, edgy woman I assumed I’d be, and instead into…I don’t know.  A pathetic, bread-eating woman who listens to Rod Stewart at a reasonable volume so as not to disturb the neighbors she occasionally hears having sex next door.  I’m becoming that aunt who you see on the holidays.  She always has crumbs on her improperly buttoned shirt and she’s alarmingly out of touch with current events and popular culture. 

Okay, I don’t really think I’m that far gone, but there is still some cause for concern.  But, seriously–the bread turned out really good.  I’m not going to force you to look at it, because that would be a new low for me, but if you want to look at how awesome my banana bread turned out…

Hot Fun in the Summer

There’s something about the beginning of summer.  And there’s definitely something about the beginning of summer in New York.  Earlier tonight I headed over to Manhattan to catch a free film at MoMA, only it was “sold” out, so I resigned myself to the sculpture garden.  All the past times I’d been to MoMA it’d been winter.  I didn’t even realize they had a sculpture garden.  But they do!  And it ended up helping me reach an important revelation.  I’ll get to that in a second.

Have you ever seen 1938’s Holiday with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn?!  I’m only about 30 minutes in, but Grant’s character, Johnny Case, just had this topical little line:

When I find myself in a position like this, I ask myself what would General Motors do? And then I do the opposite!

This was GM in '38. (No need to look at any GM photos of today.)

Okay, back to my sculpture garden revelation: people don’t care if you take their photograph when they think you’re photographing something else.  Because more than anything, I think people are fascinating.  And I want to capture them.  But it’s simply no fun dealing with someone in a tizzy because you’ve pointed and clicked them.  We’ve long debunked the idea that cameras capture your soul.  Therefore, I don’t think it’s a big deal if I shoot your face.   Anyway, here are some of my photographic stealths of the day:

If you can't be immature in the modern art museum, where can you be?

Also, I completely failed to get a digital converter box.  Screw the system.

My Neighborhood on a Grey Day

I was in a funk earlier, so I decided to walk and take photographs of the most depressing/poignant/thought-provoking things that struck me. Here are some of the results: 

Tireless

 

Men

The Chrysler Building

The Empire State Building

The Toilet

 

 

In case you couldn’t tell from the angsty tone…taking these ended up being incredibly therapeutic.  And I think I’ll undertake frequent photographic walks in the coming weeks.  It’ll be really good because…I don’t know if I’ll be in this neighborhood for much longer, so it’s sort of like spending quality time with an elderly aunt in the nursing home whose on her last leg.  Only better.

Let this be a lesson to you all.

My toilet has taken to gurgling.  It’s kind of like the noise that people make when they are about to vomit.  As it is gurgling, the water in the bowl bubbles up in sizable air pockets.  Pockets the size of Big Macs.  Or RuPaul’s fists.  What causes this phenomenon? 

I can’t remember who it was, but someone warned my roommate and me that it was entirely possible for our toilet to overflow, thus flooding our already in a sorry state apartment.  Is it the rain?  Yeah, I think that’s what the person said–the rain paired with a ground floor apartment.  When the storm drains reach maximum capacity, the water has no choice but to displace itself into the surrounding dwellings.  Like a Myanmarian refugee.  Or Queen Latifah in the 2003 classic Bringing Down the House.  (Not to be mistaken with 1995’s semi-similarly premised Houseguest, starring Sinbad and a confusingly alive Phil Hartman.)

Only it’s too simple to say “hamburger-sized air pockets, end of story.”  Because the air pockets have become carriers.  They leave behind unidentifiable debris in the porcelain.  Some of it clings to the side of the bowl.  Some of it floats aimlessly.  So now, instead of “Look what the cat dragged in,” I will, while unzipping my fly, ask no one in particular, “What did the toilet bring in?”  It’s kind of beautiful, really: The toilet, tired of being resigned to always dispose of, has broken from its fetters, and is now a producer of. 

It’s a bit like that old Ben Franklin quote: ”When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”  I’m not finished.  And neither is my toilet.

And another month has passed.

The month of May has always been close to my heart. My mom’s maiden name is May. My eldest brother was born in May. And, you know, flowers are nice.

Three weeks ago I went into one of those fast-food breakfast chains, bought a bagel with cream cheese and a medium hazelnut coffee, and then rushed back onto the street to catch a subway and a train out of the city. As usual, I was completely lost in my head. More than likely a little hungover. Slightly worried about missing my train. And drifting back and forth between allowing the universe to guide me wherever it sees fit and completely freaking out in an effort to figure out what to do with my life.

Anyway, I wandered onto the sidewalk, paper bag and styrofoam cup in hand. I waited at the curb for the red hand to turn to a white stick figure, at which time I would follow my fellow Queens pedestrians across the blacktop. As I stood there distracted, I heard a man yelling out behind me. It was obvious, for some reason, that the yelling was meant to get my attention. “MISS! HELLO, HELLO! MISS!” He was so frantic and excited, as though I’d just missed out on a once in a lifetime opportunity, or you know, dropped an earring or something. So I turned to see a man waving and smiling at me as he leaned out of a convenience store window.

At the time I just thought, “Hmm. Men are so strange.” Which is probably a thought I have a good two to three times a day. I didn’t particularly recognize the man, so I just assumed he was a bored stranger in the middle of a 14-hour shift who was cat-calling to pass the time.

Have I mentioned how much I love cats?

About a week later, train out of the city successfully caught, and then train back into the city also caught–I walked out of my apartment building on a mission to buy toilet paper at the 99 Cent Store next to the Strip Club. To get there, I had to pass the stoop next to my apartment building on which a middle-aged man sits each night. We small talk, chit-chat–you know, like real neighbors. He asks me when I’m doing laundry next. I ask him what kind of beer is in his brown bag. Put simply: we bond.

That particular night, though, I really didn’t have time to shoot the proverbial shit. The 99 Cent Store was about to close, the Strip Club was about to open, and yeah. Toilet paper was at a premium. So when I gave a distracted “Hello,” and continued walking, I was not in the mood to deal with his, “HELLO! MISS, MISS! HELLO!” But he was just so excited, so frantic, that I stopped.

And it was then that I learned my neighbor with the nightly stoop-sitting ways is the very same man who works at the convenience store next to the fast-food breakfast joint. He told me that his co-workers saw the whole ordeal. Heard him announce, “I know that girl!”, only to have that girl turn away and cross the street, her eyes showing no signs of recognition.

I apologized profusely. Our non-English-speaking super also leaned on the stoop, his head cocked, his lips curled into a perplexed smile. My neighbor shrugged off my apologies and said, “Next time you’ll know. You can have a soda on me.”

Five minutes later, toilet paper in hand, I walked by my neighbor and my super again. We all smiled in recognition at each other, but I already knew that I would likely never take my neighbor up on his free soda offer. I headed towards my own stoop, anticipating entering my bathroom where I’d replace the old roll with the new roll. My super waved. I waved back. My neighbor held up his brown paper bag, and in a one-sided toast, exclaimed, “Goodbye, Miss! Goodbye!”