A PSA for My Adult Readers

First I’d like to say, Congragulations on making it to adulthood! As you’ve probably already noticed it’s pretty sweet here, we get to stay out past our bedtime and drink booze and it has been at least 6 months since someone called me a doodyhead. But like all of our freedoms this paradise ain’t free (you don’t get your habeus corpus without a little waterboarding).

The following rules are not suggestions or nice to haves – the’re actually requirements for being the kind of person who isn’t classified as a huge douche, so pay attention.

1. Adults return people’s phone calls and emails
2. Adults say “Thanks you” when they receive a gift (preferably in writing)
3. Adults arrive on time for appointments regardless of how casual the commitment
4. Adults remember and acknowledge the birthdays of family and close friends

If you’re “bad at” some of the things on this list that’s ok – everyone has challenges in life but, as I said, these are not optional skills, this is your job. When you’re bad at your job you either get better or get fired. So you need to be working on getting it together and in the mean time you need to be apologizing profusely when you fail at any of these.

Tomorrow we’ll return to your regularly scheduled mildly humorous blog posting.

In Search of a $200 Piece of Ass

This Sunday I engaged in that most New York of hobbies – shopping. I was in dire need of new jeans (my favorite pair having finally succumbed to the weight of carrying my ass around at least twice a week for 2+ years) and had decided to allow my usually frugal self to splurge on a pair priced at over $40. I don't normally even allow myself to try on expensive jeans on the off chance that my ass would look so hot that I would no longer be able to live within the confines of The Gap and all hope I had of saving my money to one day purchase a home would be lost. But on Sunday I was brave and decided that a true New Yorker should at least know what a $150 pair of jeans look like so after a stop at Lucky Jeans (where I had the sales clerk hold a pair of fairly hot $110 pants for me) I sauntered over to Bloomingdales and quickly gathered all of their denim offerings in a 3x3 dressing room.

There are a lot of ugly expensive jeans out there. In an effort to make my fitting room task more manageable I decided to cap my jean cost at $200 and so did not try on any of the pairs that cost more than an ipod but my general feeling about the $100 and above realm is that women are suckers. 7 for all Mankind, Joe's Jeans, AG jeans – all of them let me down. I was fairly impressed with the offerings of Chip and Pepper and True Religion but no where near $196 worth of impressed. The main issue with all of these jeans was my ass crack. While makers of jeans for commoners have finally dialed their rise setting from the Patriot Bill sponsored, "I Got a Crack Just Like the Liberty Bell" ultra low to a more modest "Mmmm hipbones" the seamstresses at the posh sweatshops haven't gotten the memo ("The Homeland Security Terror Alert level has been lowered from Yellow to Orange, Ladies: PUT IT AWAY"). So most of my time in the Bloomie's dressing room was spent using all of my upper body strength to yank each pair of jeans into waist territory – most of the time with no success. Considering the recent spat of celebrity underwear raids I would advise all jean companies to offer their clientele back up exposure protection in the form of jeans that actually cover the wearer's ass.

Besides the discovery that designer jeans are not offering enough coverage to be worth the cost I also made one less happy find. It turns out that I don't really have an ass. I'm not sure how I got to be 29 without noticing this but my first instinct it to play the denial card. I am not one of those apple shaped girls whose skinny legs lead up to a flat behind hidden under a few rolls of jelly. I am decidedly pear shaped and you would think such a designation would grant its owner a nice plump tookus free of charge. No such luck. Regardless of my weight my lower body is pretty much all thigh. And so while I have ample flesh to squeeze into the behinds of expensive denim none of it forms into the kind of mounds that Sir Mix-a-Lot would croon over. From the floor up It's pretty much little foot, calf, knee, thigh, more thigh, dark meat as far as the eye can see, GOD DAMN GIRL, relatively tiny waist -- this combo does not drop dead jeans make.

I did eventually buy that first pair of jeans from Lucky (Classic Rider fit) and I feel good in them. The jeans themselves are likely not worthy of their $110 price tag but after 3 hours in dressing rooms I was willing to pay that price just to get a subway ticket home.

Mo' Mo Mo' Problems

I know everyone was hoping that I'd be bringing you a hairy November and I'm sorry to disappoint but I will not be participating in Movember. It's not that I don't love the prostate, or even that I'm a little jealous of not having a prostate of my very own (I hear they're lovely). It's just that I know exactly how it would go if I were to grow a moustache…

Day 1

Time Spent drawing stubble on upper lip with eyeliner pencil: 30 seconds

Was stalked all day by quizzical looks and raised eyebrows, it's like the world has never seen a girl taking her au natural upper lip out for a walk before. Am saddened at the sexism in our society. Spent evening drowning my sorrows in Keystone and Nascar (suddenly finding both as underrated as the magnum).

Day 5

Time spent penciling in the peach fuzz: 2 minutes

I am happy to report that the mo is coming is great. It's just a wee mo right now but I see the potential for a cozy lipwarmer in a few days time, and with the weather we've been having I know I picked the right month to grow a protective layer. I don't want to seem too cocky but I've also been noticing a few heads turn my way when I'm out and about – you know what they say, the lads just can't say no to a tash.

Day 8

Time spent penciling peach fuzz for the 5^th day in a row: 10mins

Time spent agonizing over slow moustache growth and just how badly this reflects on my femininity: half an hour

Genetics is a cruel science. No matter how many times I try to draw on the full bushy moustache that would make my daddy (a mo man himself) proud I always come out of the bathroom looking like a high school freshman with overly defined pecs. I curse my sparsely haired German roots.

Day 13

Time spent fluffing the sea of fur that seems to have sprouted overnight: 5 minutes

Time spent glued to the mirror in awe: 2 hours

My prayers have finally been answered and all I can say is Halle-freaking-lujah this morning as I put pencil to skin I found the luscious strands easily pulled from the point, it's like my lips walked right out of an Herbal Essences commercial.

Day 15

Time spent contemplating a new do: 45mins

Now that facial hair is coming in broad strokes I'm starting wonder about style – one can only get away with the feral mo for as long as the shock of the new look lasts, after that people begin to expect a little panache. I'm thinking it's time someone brought back The Belvedere.

Day 17

Time spent lovingly combing my mane of lip hair: 30mins

This morning on the subway two men sat down on either side of me, one was tall and lanky with a sexy mess of bed head and the other had a sprinkling of freckles and a boyish grin that melted my underwear clean off. Both of them could not get enough of the 'stache. They spent the entire commute petting it and cooing my name. I don't want to get my hopes up but it looks like the mo could be the love catalyst I've been looking for!

Day 20

Time spent trying to resist picking up the washcloth and freeing myself of this hypnotic nose skirt: 53.4mins

I don't know what to do. All around me I see men walking away from families, jobs and really deserving sports teams to devote their lives to me and my mo. Of course I'm flattered but between my nightly talk show and the calendar shoot I just don't have time to give all of my followers the hours with me that they crave. I'm so disheartened by the challenges of leading a cult that I wonder if it can really be worth it….

Day 24

Time spent wringing tears from my sodden 'stache: 33mins

I'm sure by now you've all read about the stock market crash. I just want to say that when this month started I obviously underestimate the combined power of my god given charisma when gilded by a crumb catcher. I only wanted to make the world a safer place for prostates; I had no idea how dangerous this road would be.

Day 30, 11:30pm

Time spent scrubbing eyeliner off of my upper lip: 10mins

Well it's over. I've washed my face raw but black eyeliner will always live as a stain on my soul. I'm sorry for the disaster that I have wrought. I'm sorry for the marriages that will never recover, the crops left to rot in the fields and, of course, for the re-breakup of the Backstreet Boys (Private to Nick and AJ in LA: bros before hos with mos). I have thrown out my eyeliner pencil and will be a liquid liner only girl for here on out – I think it's clear that I can't be trusted with anything else. Men, please go back to your wives, your jobs, your bands -- the heaven you thought you'd find in the warm hug of my mo is not a reality. Girls, please heed my warning: There are good reasons for the taboo against female facial hair, wax it, nair it, shave it, do whatever you have to do – and stay away from the pencil.

I love the prostate but I can't risk the downfall of life as we know it -- please funnel your generous donations in the directions of my mo-brother Mike (donate here).

Once Again I Honor the Most Poorly Named Event In the Blogosphere

It is with great trepidation that I promise to (again) blog everyday in November despite the fact that I require an average of 8 hours of staring at a blinking cursor to come up with anything blog-worthy. It is possible that I am too hard on myself when it comes to my writing. (It is also possible that the ocean has a lot of water and that eating an entire Riter Sport bar for breakfast everyday is bad for you -- it's a big world full of infinite possibilities.) The lesson that I hope to learn this month is that mediocrity is often just fine. But in addition to so-so posts (likely about what I cooked last night) you can also look forward to the following:

1. Sandra Lee is crazy like a dog addicted to laser pointer part 2 (Part 1)
   
2. I finally get around to making root beer (story likely to be followed by the irresistible follow-up post “I finally get around to eating (drinking?) 15 root beer floats and gaining 75lbs”)
3. Reader Suggestions! Since I’m out of ideas it’s time to steal yours – post a topic in the comments and I promise to write about it in the month of November (one suggestion per customer offer void in Bowling Green Kentucky – I promise that there are no ideas worth writing about living in that city).

Tomorrow at 3:00pm in Uranus...

We have nine conference rooms at my office and through the powers of uncreative thinking and laziness all nine are named after planets in the solar system (well, 8 planets and one very ambitious asteroid which I personally tried to have renamed "The planet formerly known as Pluto" complete with a confusing petroglyph but no one took the bait). Upon moving into the new office last May the cool kids tried very hard to avert this disastrous first step from cool tech company into the land of polite smiles, water cooler chit chat and sensible shoes, but alas, we failed (though the resistance movement has so far been able to sustain our general cool or at least the super charged denial that allows computer nerds the world over to continue to believe that the geeks finally have inherited the earth.).

I might have been able to abide this boring naming structure if even a little bit of effort was made to sensibly assign planets to rooms but sadly the logic used to name each room resides snuggly in a reality where Copernican astronomy never really caught on (who knew my office was located inside the bowls of some fundamentalist church). To recreate this elegant system at your own office simply follow these steps:

1. The biggest conference room should be called Earth
2. All other conference rooms should be named in reference to their distance from the center of the universe (aka Earth). (If you don’t have any idea how far a planet is from Earth just remember that both business and science love a creative guess!)

Along with the never ending hilarity of scheduling meetings in Uranus this naming structure leads to such ridiculousness as the smallest conference room being named after Neptune and a pronounced lack of rings around Saturn. This sort of inconsistency is exactly the kind of chaos that causes mild mannered left brained freaks like me to lose their minds.

The company would likely be saddened to know the number of working hours that I have lost to thoughts of how these rooms could be reordered or renamed in a fashion that more accurately represents the actual solar system. But even more distressing is how the influence of this broken system has turned me stupid. Last Wednesday, after wasting at least 10 minutes sitting alone in a conference room waiting for the other meeting attendees to show up, I discovered that my subconscious is so committed to righting this system that it has managed to override both memory and the desire not to look like an idiot in front of my coworkers. For proof of how the company’s disregard for astronomy has lead directly to my social and mental downfall see the following conversation:

Setting: Instant Messenger

Bri: Are we having this damn meeting? Because I’m sitting in Venus all alone.

Coworker: No you’re not.

30 second pause

Bri: oh…. Right… I’m in Mars.

While I was in transit from Mars to Venus (not passing Earth NOR collecting any space dust on the way but it should be noted that while rocketing along I did fall through some sort of wormhole that caused me to briefly fly by Saturn) this little vignette was, of course, read aloud to all meeting attendees. Ok, yes, I have worked in this office for 1.5 years. Yes, I should have completely internalized the conference room locations by now. BUT I was in a meeting in Earth right before the scheduled rendezvous in Venus and I thought to myself “oh, perfect, Venus is right next to Earth, NO PROBLEM.”

*sigh*

R*nd*m Acc*ss B*bble (Radio Edit)

People often confuse me with Snoop Dogg. I never quite know which of our many shared traits to blame for these gaffs (I’ve always just assumed it was the way bitches are drawn to both of us like stoner moths to the flame of a sweet doobie) but one cross that we are both forced to bare is the inability of the mass media to handle our art in its most hardcore and raw form. And so, when the Fordham NPR affiliate, WFUV, asked me to record my NYC Supermarket’s blog post for their Cityscape program I knew there was bound to be some censoring to create a more “radio friendly” version of my emotional outpouring. That's just the way those wanksters roll. That sanitized version of the post will air this Saturday at 7:30 am, you can be outraged in real time by listening online here but we all know that you and Snoop will both still be passed out at that hour so why not come to terms with your own limitations and subscribe to the Cityscape podcast?

The episode is now up in the archive -- go listen!

P.S. OH MY GOD Y’ALL I AM TOTALLY FAMOUS.

Wii-diculous

As a good little Nintendo fangirl I’ve wanted a Wii for almost a year now but I’ve been self-righteously refusing to camp out on street corners, scour the black market or break into the houses of people willing to do such things and so have remained wii-less. While laziness played a part in my resistance I was also denying myself access to sweet Nintendo action as protest of the ridiculously bad system currently in place for procuring the white box of awesomeness. I’m going to assume that most of my readers are not on the cutting edge of video game platform procurement so let me catch you up on the “getting a Wii” process.

1. Think to yourself “Self, Super Mario Galaxy comes out in a month and you love Mario so much that you sometimes get a little giddy when your sink clogs. You should order a Wii, surely those silly shortages have been solved by now, after all, the product has been out for a year!”
2. Visit all online retailers only to be greeting with a myriad of creatively designed “sold out” images (empty wooden pallet, empty box, cruel mocking sad face, etc).
3. Curse your stupidity for listening to that stupid “self” person, she is never right!
4. Subscribe to multiple Wii search tools all of which kindly inform you on a regular basis that you are SOL.
   
5. Consider getting up extra early on Wednesday to visit the Nintendo World store on the rumor that they receive new stock first thing Wednesday mornings.
6. Whine on your blog

One of the charming quirks that I’ve developed through working in software for 7.5 years is the tendency to constantly note the poor UI design of life. For those of you who have thought “hmmm the designer of this life? AWESOMELY INTELLIGENT.” I present the following list of life features that have some serious bugs.

1. Babies
2. Traffic
3. My hair
4. Dating
5. Shopping for a Wii

Thankfully some of these glitches can be fixed without the help of a higher power and I encourage the rest of you to get on that shit – I don’t have to act because I am super busy fixing all of your damn software (and I offer one big special in advance thank you bug fix to whoever fixes dating cause that system is CRAP). Thank me in the comments.

But back to Nintendo. In 2007 people should not have to hunt down products a year after they’re released. It is Nintendo’s job to provide me with an easy way to buy their products. It is my job to give them money. (see: capitalism). I believe they also have this crazy system in Japan so the distribution department over at Nintendo has no excuse for sitting around eating fish flavored ice cream and reading disturbing comic books involving panty-less preteens and giant sea creatures while store shelves idle on empty. Of course there is one other possible group of people to stereotypically assign blame to. I’m sure that by now (after reading “Wii” a dozen time) you’ve noticed that “Wii” is the same thing as “WII” which stands for World War Two which caused a lot of shortages which lead to rationing of goods. And now I can’t get a Wii. Coincidence? Impossible. I think we may be able to officially blame the Nazi’s for this bullshit.