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Nooh Yawk

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In the cab

Me: Well! That was great! Honestly. I was really thoroughly impressed with Harry Potter in that.

Nordic Boy: Apparently not impressed enough to stop calling him Harry Potter.

Me: Whoops.

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Expecto Patronum

Sitting in the ultra nosebleed seats, waiting for "How to Succeed in Business" to start. There sure are a lot of teens here, and they seem awfully excited to see John Laroquette. I hope they won't be too disappointed when they realize they have to sit through lots and lots of Daniel Radcliffe. Someone should have warned them about that.

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Park Centrally

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Squared

Sunset at Washington Square. Perfect weather, perfect evening.

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Getting High

In love with a sunny day at the Highline Park in Chelsea.

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Lordy

Best pierogis evahhhhh. B&H in the East Village.

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Getting the Bird

Let's go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art! Let me just consult my walking map here. Where is that museum again?

Thanks, helpful NY bird. Poop marks the spot.

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My new demographic?

Just went to the most old-ladiest thing ever.

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Getting Appley

Got to New York just in time for a warm dusk walk with my dude. No coat! No tights! On either of us! Suck it, Seattle.

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Hosed

Well, you did me proud, my friends. I now have a list as long as my arm of places to get good grub in New York. Granted, I sort of forgot that one can't spit without hitting a restaurant in New York, so I realize the question was kind of overkill, but still. I appreciate it, and although I won't be able to hit them all (I only have one stomach and so much time after all), I shall be prepared, much like a culinary boy scout.


Here's what's going on with me.

1. I went to another roller derby match. What was notable about this was that after the match (game? match? round?), it was raining, and my friends wanted to go out, and I didn't go, because it was cold and raining. I have become that person who just wants to go home when it rains, which is the kiss of death if you live in Seattle. I want it on the record (you keep a record, don't you?) that I went home, but didn't say it was because of the rain. My streak of not being whiny about weather stands and I want full credit for that.

2. I went to the Nordstrom hosiery department (ha ha, hosiery) and there was a long line at the register. Apparently Sunday was Buy Some Legtubes Day. In front of me was a girl about 14 years old. She was buying Spanx. The Nordstrom worker was a lady, probably about 70, with big hair and Liberace rings on her fingers. This is the conversation I heard.

Liberace: Oh, HONEY. Is this your very first pair of Spanx?

Girl: (quietly) Yes.

Liberace: Let me tell you, you will LOVE THEM. I love mine. They feel like someone is just HOLDING YOU TIGHT. You know what I mean? Ha ha.

Girl: (slowly evaporating into thin air)

Liberace: I think they work best if you just don't WEAR UNDERWEAR. That's the best. They feel better on your bottom. Nothing gets BUNCHED UP, you know?

Girl: (bursting into flame)

Liberace: If you DO have to wear underwear though, make sure it's the silky kind. You may be too young- are you wearing silky ones yet? Or still cottony?

Girl: (shriveling up like a prune)

Liberace: You don't have to tell me. Just don't wear underwear. No one will know, honey! I'm not wearing any right now, and you can't tell, right?

It went on forever. It was like Rowan Atkinson in Love, Actually merged with the grandma in Sixteen Candles.

3. I realized that the last three times I got my haircut, my stylist did not listen to me, and I walked out of there with boring hair each and every time. Thricely. I think three times is enough chances, don't you? This weekend, I went to a new person, in a fancier salon, and I sat in the chair and for the first 5 minutes, I straight up bossed her. I may or may not have acted like a crazy person. However, I got a good haircut. I think I may have gotten it from instilling fear, but I got it. I am hoping my bossy voice was at least nice-ish, like a certain someone I know.

A girl has to eat

Your assignment: tell me where I should eat in New York. Click on comments and type it up! Or email me!

DO IT.

Consumables #39

Here's what my brain et lately.

Books!


Lost and Found, by Shaun Tan
I adore Shaun Tan. The end.

Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan
Character study to the max. Emily is a widow who spends her days thinking about her life and her death, hanging with her beloved dog, meeting up with her pal Arlene for buffet, and keeping contact with her kids and grandkids. I like how kind O'Nan is to his characters, and how Emily is a person who spends most of her time alone, but isn't lonely.

The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex, by Kristen Schaal and Rich Blomquist
I didn't quite know what this book was going to be, and I still don't.

Movies!

Eyes of Tammy Faye
Documentary about Tammy Faye. I thought it was sad, on a lot of levels. Yes, it was campy too, but mostly sad.

Agora
Sound editing drove me crackers on this. Either the characters were whispering (volume up, turn it up!) or mobs were screaming (ahhh! turn it down! down!). Every five seconds. I had to stop watching because I was having thumb-on-remote fatigue.

Fast Runner
I love this movie. Love, love, love.
TV!

Dancing with the Stars
I'm going to tell you a little secret. I keep my eyes glued to the professionals for this show, not the stars. It's sort of like watching with half a brain, or with one eye shut. I just block out Ralph Macchio or Kirstie Alley and focus on the dancers. And I also lean heavily on the fast forward button. Really I think I probably watch about 10 full minutes of an hour long show.

Music!

Pat Benatar's Love is a Battlefield came on when we were making dinner the other night. After a few moments of silence, this was said.
 
Nordic Boy: I really love this song.
Me: Me too!
Nordic Boy: Like, not ironically. I just really love it, for real.
Me: (with relief) ME TOO.
Nordic Boy: (nodding thoughtfully) I'm glad we've had this moment.
Me: Me too.
 

Like a Record Baby

Sheet, it's already Wednesday. Keep meaning to post, but the world keeps spinning and me along with it.


On the up side, I think spring is finally coming out from behind the clouds. A little. Maybe. Sometimes.

Other awesome stuff in my world lately:

1. Biogirl threw a birthday party for herself wherein we played Celebrity. During the charades round, she busted out a Michael Jackson imitation that included a "whoo!" that could not be contained escaping from her lips. And really, who can blame her? What is MJ without his whoo?

2. Nordic Boy did a coy rendition of Marilyn Monroe during the charades round as well. Holding his imaginary skirt down, batting his eyes, making a Marilyn mouth, the whole bit. It held about 5% of the silliness that he can muster up, but still, it blew the partygoers away. I love seeing how people who don't know him well react to how much of a clown he really is- I enjoy their reaction so much more than his actual clownishness. When you first get to know him you would so never guess it, with that serious face of his, so people get such a kick out of it when he is funny all of a sudden. It seems out of nowhere. I want to say dudes, you have no idea.

3. A story was told about how, in a fit of road rage, our friend Rob yelled out the nonsensical but hilarious phrase "Jesus Tits!" at someone in another car. Need I say that this is a new favorite for us?

4. Spent an evening with some library coworker friends and no one talked about work, not ONCE. It was a sweet, sweet miracle.

5. Got a Sunday morning serenade from Nordic Boy. It was a full voice (loud ass) rendition of "You Spin Me Right Round." With dancing. It was quite a sight.
6. Spent a sunny Saturday literally tiptoeing through the tulips in Skagit Valley. It spun me right round baby right round.

Old Kid on the Block

When I was in 12th grade I had a friend named Emma who loved New Kids on the Block. That's right, we weren't 13, or 8. We were in the twelfth grade. Not only that, NKOTB (oh yes, I am abbreviating it, yo) was on the wane, so cool points were in the negative numbers. And let me rephrase my first statement. I was in 12th grade. Emma was a year older than me. Technically an adult. She also happened to be the smartest person (in the conventional sense anyway) that I knew at the time. In a world where not many people left my town, and hardly anyone I knew left the state, she graduated from our less-than-awesome public high school in our less-than-middle-class town and went to the Ivy League. I remember that I used to tease her relentlessly about her NKOTB fixation, and the summer before she left for college, I bought her a cheap-o NKOTB keychain as a joke and she took that shit to college and put her dorm room key on it and was like Hi, college smarty bluebloods, I am from FLINT and I have an unabashed love for Tigerbeat boys and also IN YOUR FACE.


You kind of have to love a girl like that.

Emma took the teasing in stride and not only that, she bought me a matching keychain which I used for a few months in a startling premonition of pre-hipsterism. I didn't like NKOTB, but I was a teen and I was being funny and shut up all you ironic mustache dudes of the 21st century, I got your uncool-coolness before you were out of Huggies. I look back on that and try not to roll my eyes at myself, but it's hard. Anyway, Emma educated me about the basics of NKOTB. Because of her, I know the songs, I know their names, I know that she had Jon picked out for herself (the Shy One) while she couldn't decide whether Donnie (the Bad Boy) or Jordan (the Hot One) was her choice for me, should I be in need of her arranging my marriage. She did not let my gagging noises hinder her pure, true love in the slightest. She was impervious to teen cynical rays, which wow. That's kind of a superpower.

During the spring of my senior year, Mike was one of my closest friends. Mike was not my first gay male friend (it may sound stereotypical but I grew up in theater and dance so I think I knew more gay men than straight ones when I was little, no lie) but he probably was my first gay boyfriend. By that I don't mean that we were dating, but rather that we did a lot of stuff together, just the pair of us. My first actual gay boyfriend was Aaron, a super hot theater boy who I dated in 11th grade theater camp who wouldn't make out with me and I couldn't figure out why until the he came out after high school and all our awkward dates became crystal clear. But I digress. Mike won two tickets to see NKOTB in concert from some sort of contest. I don't know that Mike was a particular fan either, but come on, it was a free show. Also, it is probable that he could not deny the NKOTB teen-gay-cuteness. Mike shopped around for someone to go to this concert with, especially me. To which I said, um, no. Sitting in Emma's room listening to Hanging Tough while I yelled in pain was one thing. Going to a concert? In public? Where people wouldn't KNOW that I was being ironic? I couldn't get with that.

I remember the NKOTB date search becoming a thing. If only Emma wasn't off playing polo in college or whatever they do in the Ivy League, she would have been all over it. I called her and told her about Mike's tickets and she almost cried. For real. She almost cried. I could tell that she thought this was a travesty that we, a couple of ingrates, had tickets, but she begged me to go.

You see where this is going, don't you? I went.

Mike drove me to the stadium, and I remember that we talked about whether or not I was going to prom (Mike wanted me to but I had a strict No Prom Policy), and the juicy details of my romance with a band boy in his early 20s, and who of our friends were going to hook up during the last show we were in of the year. We also got into a big talk about my upcoming graduation (Mike was a year younger than me), and how I was going to leave for college and how we were going to still be friends forevah, promise. There was tension because Mike wasn't really out (in that way where everyone knew he was gay but he hadn't actually said it himself yet) and in the car he was trying to tell me, and I was trying to encourage him, but he just couldn't do it. It turned into a kind of melancholy talk, and Mike and I were seldom melancholy with each other.

We arrived at the venue and suddenly we were awash in a sea of screaming 12-year-old girls and their moms who drove them there. Yep. Tween girls and middle-aged ladies. And us. Me in my Cure t-shirt and Mike in his non-girlness. We looked at each other, wondered what we were doing there, shrugged, and went to our seats. Our really good contest-winning seats.

By the time we got to our seats, my melancholy had started to get to me. It was a few weeks before my high school graduation, and the NKOTB concert day was the first day that I started to get really strong nostalgia-in-advance about leaving. I didn't want to leave Mike, I was in a semi-adult relationship, I was growing up. Looking around at all the 12-year-olds, I felt ancient, as only a 17-year-old can. Kid stuff was fading too fast, and being there just made it more dramatic. Not that my high school self needed fuel to increase drama levels.

Then the concert started, and you know how it started? Indoor freaking fireworks.

I had never really been to a concert like that before. Keep in mind that the first concert I ever went to was Dizzy Gillespie. The second was Neil Young. Neither known for fireworks. The biggest concert I had gone to up until then was a Madonna concert in the 9th grade, and that had lots of costume changes, but that was more theatrical than spectacle. NKOTB? I have to admit it. At least to my 12th grade eye, it was amazeballs.

Fireworks, huge dance numbers (come on, you know me, I love a dance number), a big harness thing that carried the singers high above the crowd, and you guys, there were explosions. It blew my hair back.

Being all ironical went out. the. window. Eye rolling ceased. It was like a tidal wave of cheese washed over us all, and we were helpless to resist it. Mike and I got up out of our seats, and we danced, and whooped, and jumped, and sang (thank you Emma, for learning me those lyrics), and hugged, and acted like the kids we were, and just fucking embraced it. I think about that night as I write this and it's so full of how much Mike and I loved each other and how much fun we had and how young we were and how beautiful a night it was.

You heard me. NKOTB was a beautiful thing.

After the show was over, we didn't really talk about the experience. It was as if we had seen each other naked and we just silently agreed that it had been fun, but we were never going to speak of it again.

After the concert, I had gone back to my regularly scheduled NKOTB surliness and never came back out of it. Years later I would tell people at parties about the time I had gone to the concert, like a badge of horrible honor. "That's the worst concert you've ever been to?" I would say, "well, get this- I saw New Kids on the Block!" and my friends would nod at me with a "wow, you win" look in their eye. I treat this concert like an episode of The Office: funny because it's embarrassing.

Last week, I turned my tv on, and you know who was on? New Kids on the Block. Not only that, but apparently they are now teamed up with the Backstreet Boys into a Giant Supergroup Boyband Blob of Doom. I thought "oh jeeeeez" and started to watch them, and I was surprised to find that I found the whole thing super endearing. They are all probably in their 40s now, and you know what? They don't care that they are middle-aged dudes. They still have their motherfucking explosions, and their gelled hair, and their dance numbers, and their tidal wave of cheese. They don't give a good goddamn if they are getting creaky in the knees. Screw it.

I always wonder about the older ladies that still turn into mush when they see Donny Osmond, or David Cassidy, or whatever. The feminist in me thinks STOP GOING GOOGOO OVER SOME RANDOM DUDE AND MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF. But when I watched NKOTB the other night, I could relate to those ladies. Not because of the dudes, but it made me remember that concert, and not like I had been telling it at parties. It made me really remember it. Me and my pal Mike, being kids. Throwing our hands in the air, waving them like we just don't care. I didn't care about being cerebral, I didn't care about what it looked like, I wasn't doing anything but acting a fool with my best friend. I guess I'm one of those googoo older ladies now, in a way.

Emma, you were sort of right. Well, you were still wrong, but sort of right. Ok, yes, you were right. Goddamn it.

Next time you feel embarrassed about secretly enjoying something cheesy, just let go. Seriously, let go. Be silly, and love it, and just stop being critical for five minutes.  Like these guys.

A hundred times

Thanks to those of you who emailed me your weirdo childhood earworms yesterday. I think my favorite story was from Delium, who reminded me of this story: when he was a kid, he and his friends found some sort of coupon that you could send in to get a free pair of ladies underwear from Hanes or something. Which, hi marketing executive who thought of that, you have basically thought up a great way for kids like Delium to play pranks on each other, among other nefarious things. Delium and his friends filled out the coupon with another friend's name and address, thus ordering him some girl undies. Somehow, they knew when the package arrived, and thus began the taunt: Joe got silkies in the may-ell! Joe got silkies in the may-ell!


And so now, Oocha has left the building, but the hot and happening tune "Silkies in the Mail" has taken up residence in my brain. Thanks, Delium!

*****

When my siblings and I were little, we would tend to scarf down our meals, as tiny scruffy rugrats can do. Little kids are very busy and need to get back to important business like ordering silkies for each other, so we have to power lunch, don't you know. My dad used to try to remind us to eat slower by telling us that we had to chew each bite a hundred times. This would make us laugh hysterically because as kids we were a really easy comedic audience. "A hundred times? Daddy, you're crazy!" we would giggle and giggle. But of course then we would try our hardest to see if we really could chew our bites a hundred times, which of course we couldn't, but at least we were chewing more often so who's the crazy one now?

The other day, I tried to work this psychological magic on an adult. Namely, my Nordic Boy. He was leaving for Portland for biznass like he does every week, and right before he left, I said the following.

Me: Call me when you get there.
Him: Yep!
Me: And other times when you're there too.
Him: Uh, yeah.
Me: In fact, why don't you call me a hundred times?
Him: What?
Me: While you're gone, in the next few days. Call me a hundred times.
Him: (silence)
Turns out, the hundred times thing doesn't work on adults. Either as incentive or as comedy. Just in case you were thinking of taking my dad's schtick on the road.

Oocha

I have an earworm today, and it's driving me ker-azy.


As you know, I have a good memory when it comes to my childhood. Actually, a great memory, if I do say so myself. I hardly ever have times when I can't remember something that happened to me. But yesterday I did, and now I can't stop thinking about it.

Last night, Nordic Boy was going to have ice cream for dessert. I was freezing my nuts off so I declined to join. I was rifling through the fridge, looking for a snack, when I came across a lone cinammon roll in the freezer. It was one of my mom's famous cinnamon rolls that I had been saving, like gold, because that's what it is. I looked at it, and thought about heating and eating, but I held out. I need it to last as long as possible.

Seeing that cinammon roll though? Triggered something weird in my memory. Because I said to Nordic Boy the following phrase:

"Oocha ate a seen-ah-meen roll! Ha- haaaa!"

I said it like it was a taunt. Like a little kid tease. In the same sing-song way that a kid might sing to another kid. Like Nelson from The Simpsons.

Nordic Boy: What did you say?
Me: Oocha ate a cinnamon roll, ha- haaa!"
Nordic Boy: What is that, a song?
Me: No.
Nordic Boy: Who is Oocha?
Me: This kid who used to play soccer with my brother when we were little. We called him Oocha.
Nordic Boy: Why?
Me: I have no idea. That wasn't his name. We just made it up?
Nordic Boy: And you'd tease him about eating a cinnamon roll?
Me: Totally. We would chant it. It was nice teasing, he would laugh. But whenever he would walk by we would sing that.
Nordic Boy: Well, yeah, it was nice teasing. It doesn't make sense. How is eating a cinnamon roll a taunt? That's the least lethal teasing I have ever heard.
Me: I don't know what it means. But we sang it constantly.
Nordic Boy: And I really want to know where the hell you got Oocha from.
Me: Me too!

Why did we call that kid Oocha? And why the weird song? OMG THIS IS KILLING ME.

It's all I can think, over and over, in the back of my mind. Oocha ate a cinnamon roll, ha-haaa!

That's what I am thinking today. That is all.

Sunlove

Me: Look at all the people riding their bikes and gardening and walking around outside!
Biogirl: The first sunny Saturday and people are going bananas trying to soak it up before it's gone again.
Me: Totally.
Biogirl: What's Nordic Boy doing today?
Me: Going to the dump.
Biogirl: Everyone has their own way of being excited by spring, I suppose.

*****

Ways in which my weekend rocketh mine hizzy outeth.


1. Sun! Sun! Sun! It was in the mid-sixties, people! And dry! And sun! You should have seen all the Seattle vampires squinting! Love.

2. Biogirl and I went up north and stood around on the grounds of a winery. As you do. There was grass, and ducks, and middle aged white dudes in Tommy Bahama outfits. It felt anthropological.

3. Had a lovely lunch at Cafe Flora.

4. Went with Biogirl to the ice cream joint where we got yelled at that one time. The workers there were super nice today. I felt suspicious of this, like it was a trap or something.

5. Went to Seward Park with Nordic Boy and walked the loop.

6. Walked over to my neighborhood book store and chatted with the booksellers. I love that I have friendly neighborhood booksellers.

7. Walked over to Greenlake, and on the way home, ran into lovely Linda and her cute doggie. I also love walking down the street and seeing friendly faces.

8. Got all the weekly chores done. Groceries, menu planning, laundry, cleaning, bills, done. Look y'all, I am a grown up!

9. Sat on my stoop and talked to my folks on the phone, barefooted. Did I mention there was sun?

10. TURNED THE HEAT OFF.

It's now Monday and back to rain, but that's ok. I'm still feeling weekend afterglow. I'll be back to my regularly scheduled rain rage tomorrow.