About a year ago, I totally bashed Twitter as being a silly, useless vanity app. And now, as evidenced by the Twitter badge on the right, I’m a Twitterer. A Twit, maybe.
Why not? I like the idea of being able to micro-blog from my phone. I want to remain on the forefront of technology. And I’m paying for 400 text messages a month, 90% of which go unused. Why not?
Posted in Miscellany.
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– January 17, 2009
Today was a gorgeous freezing Friday and I had nothing to do until late afternoon. No work, no meetings, no errands, and no burning desire to tackle my ongoing To-Do list. I contemplated staying in bed, nuzzled safely under the electric blanket with Infinite Jest propped up in front of me so I could shave off another 100 pages off of the 1000-page tome that is, indeed, proving to be infinite but does not contain, thus far, abundant jest.
But how can I lay in bed when there’s 6 inches of snow on the ground, just laying there, begging to XC skied upon? So I logged onto Zipcar.com to procure a car and then drove it 20 minutes away to Weston Ski Track, which boasts the lone 15 kilometers of groomed XC ski trails in the Boston metro area.
Though I have gone to the Weston Ski Track once before, we did not actually ski that day due to the icy conditions, and our overall impression was not impressed. The Weston Ski Track is located entirely on a golf course. Though it is common for XC ski courses to double as golf courses, WST’s golf course is particularly sterile, with only a smattering of token trees. Not only is it uninviting, the lack of protection from the sun makes the snow patchy and icy. And both the Massachusetts Turnpike and I-95 are located less than 1 mile away, filling the air with the dull roar of the highway and invisible exhaust particles.
But today, the WST was my only salient option. I arrived at 10am, the official opening time, although I spotted several skiers already on the course as I drove up in my Zipcar (a Nissan Versa with 3000 miles on it). As I lazily unloaded my skis from the backseat, a woman drove up in a Volkswagen. She hopped out wearing bright-green sexy pants and a matching jacket with a XC Ski club stenciled in yellow on the back. Only a hardcore ski jock would wear something so preposterous. She grabbed her skis and ran to the course. Later I would see her doing insane drills like repeatedly skiing uphill without using her poles.
In fact, at 10am the WST was crawling with XC ski jocks. I was probably the least hardcore skier there, in that I’m not training for a race or wearing a club insignia. Other skiers flew past me with scary velocity. There’s 2 reasons why I’m slow. One, my skis — cloddy comfort cruisers — are simply not designed to fly. Two, when I go skiing it’s an all-day affair, meaning I’m used to pacing myself. I have endurance. These speed demons may be leaving me in their wake, but they’re done by 11:30am.
I skied on the icy tracks for another hour, feeling a little ridiculous on the golf course. It’s the XC skiing equivalent of a treadmill. My dissatisfaction comes to an apex when the sound of chainsaw reared across the icy plain. A public works crew was chopping down trees along the perimeter of the golf course. That’s when I realized it’s impossible to really commune with nature when you’re only 15 minutes from Boston.
Posted in Existence.
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– January 16, 2009
When I leave the office to get lunch, usually I head to Cosi. The exceptions are when I’m too rushed to make the 20 minute roundtrip walk into the Financial District, or when I’m with co-workers who invariably dismiss Cosi as being overpriced and/or unsatisfying. “I’m not going to Cosi. I’m not going to wait in line for ten minutes behind dozens of ravenous fresh-from-the-gym yuppies. I’m not going to pay $7 for a lettuce flatbread sandwich garnished with meat,” says Co-worker, who prefers Viga, the Italian place that serves enormous $5 sandwiches, because only a Viga sandwich will tame his appetite until dinner.
Me, I’m willing to spend the extra few dollars at Cosi on what I perceive to be a higher quality of food. Cosi lettuce is at least two shades darker green than Viga lettuce. Cosi sandwich spread does not taste like it came from a vat of industrial mayo. Cosi eggplant does not have the texture, consistency, and appearance of leather. And all of Cosi’s flatbread is fresh from the open-flame oven that anchors every store. Nothing nourishes my soul like warm bread!
Yes, the Cosi portions are a fraction of the Viga portions, but I don’t believe that people who sit at desks 9 hours a day need a 10-inch long, 5-inch wide, 2-inch thick slab of greasy foccaccia loaded with meat and cheese in order to meet their nutritional requirements. Maybe if I was hiking a 4000-foot mountain, I’d want that level of caloric support, which I guestimate to be at least 1000 high-fat low-fiber calories. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that there’s, like, 5 times the number of overweight people in Viga than in Cosi?” I ask Co-worker one day after we leave Viga.
“So what are you saying, that Viga makes people fat?” asks Co-Worker, who is of normal weight. Somehow. “No, fat people just like Viga more. It fits into their dietary plan. They’d eat just as much if they went to Cosi, only they’d have to pay for 2 sandwiches.”
These days, most of my co-workers are bringing their lunches from home to avoid having to go out in the frigid winter weather. And so I’ve been going to Cosi almost every day for a sandwich, usually the Hummus and Veggie, the Fire-Roasted Vegetable, or the Tomato Basil Mozzarella. Cosi sandwiches come with either a bag of potato chips or a bag of baby carrots, and since it’s winter and I need a little grease to keep my ribs warm, I take the potato chips.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that Cosi had two types of potato chips, plain and salt and pepper. I tried the salt and pepper potato chips and found them unbelievably scrumptious! Cosi’s peppered potato chips awakened within me a lust for flavored chips that has lain dormant since college senior year, when dinner would be a 99 cent bag of Doritos. (I had a passion for Doritos. So tasty!) All morning I would sit at my desk, counting the minutes until lunchtime and Cosi and the salt and pepper potato chips.
“You know those have MSG in them?” Co-worker just happened to be walking past my desk as I was digging into my salt and pepper potato chips.
“What? No they don’t,” I said. I have a weird reaction to MSG… not physical, just mental, because for 30 years my initials were “MSG,” so I rather enjoy the notoriety, although I’d rather not ingest it.
“Yeah they do. All flavored chips have MSG in them,” Co-Worker says, flipping the bag over and pointing to the ingredients. Sure enough, Mono-Sodium Glutamate. “What do you think of that, Ms. Cosi Quality?”
Naturally, I was horrified to find out that I’ve been giving my body a daily dose of MSG. But I couldn’t reveal that to Co-worker. “So that’s why they’re so good,” I said, smiling until he walked away, when I promptly dropped the half-eaten bag into the trash. I felt betrayed, as if Cosi has lulled me into a false sense of security and then drugged my body with toxins. Such are the perils of lunch in This Modern World.
Posted in The 9 to 5.
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– January 14, 2009
That running title for my weekly acupuncture treatment is catchy, but now a misnomer. The discount has run out and the cost has vaulted from “discount” to “premium.” My health plan isn’t covering it, so I bear this expense with a fair amount of wincing. I reason: Well, I’m thrifty in other ways. This is my health, after all. It’s not like I’m going to a spa for Ayurvedic treatments and hot-stone massages. It’s acupuncture, a practice that even the National Institute of Health has recognized as effective for the treatment of several diseases… none of which I have, but still, that establishes it within the annals of even staid government-sponsored Western medicine.
When Western medicine advocates acupuncture, the most frequently cited benefit is lowered stress via the release of endomorphins. Does this mean acupuncture has the potential to become addictive? What will my body do if deprived of its weekly needling? I see myself huddled in an alley with the other acupuncture junkies — “acupunkies” — fiending for balanced yin-yang and sticking dirty needles in each other’s spleen meridans.
Tonight M. stuck a needle in the top of my head, right where my hair part would be if I had parted it straight. I knew from M.’s website biography that she was keen on “scalp acupuncture,” but I never imagined… on me. Last week she stuck a needle between my eyes, which made me anxious at first but it turned out to be a very relaxing point. I think M. was working up to the top of my head. I must say, I bore the scalp needle like a champion pin cushion.
Speaking of champion pin cushions… the Chinese acupuncturist pictured at the right pierced his head with over 2008 decorative needles to celebrate last summer’s Olympics. His qi must be as unfettered as Niagara Falls. Before I started acupuncture, this picture would have totally freaked me out, but now… no, sorry, it still freaks me out.
Posted in Existence.
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– January 13, 2009
My theory of the East Coast of the United States is that the deposition of the citizenry correlates to the temperature of their respective environs. People warm up the further south you go, all the way to Key West, a town so laid back that it’s perfectly acceptable to ask where the closest ‘pisser’ is. Head north and the smiles gradually harden and frosty detachment becomes the norm. Here in Boston, people will actually glare at you for sneezing in public. Go an hour further north and you’ll be in Maine, where only the moose smile at strangers.
So a small town in Maine is getting a topless coffee shop, thanks to a local entrepreneur who told the Boston Globe “Everything is failing, but nudity is not a dying business. No matter where you go, people are half-dressed. I figured, what the hell can I lose?” How about your shirt, ha ha? Seriously… where are people half-dressed in Maine? Even at the height of summer, it’s too cold to wear a swimsuit to the beach.
The topless coffee shop will be called… The Topless Coffee Shop. So much for retaining an air of mystery. On the menu will be coffee, tea, cappuccino, juices, soda, and pastries. Oh, the innuendo. “Would you like milk or cream?” Oh, the hazards of frothing milk at the espresso machine.
My initial reaction is that the people who hang out in coffee shops aren’t the same crowd who get off on a topless staff. But the shop could attract a following, simply because there’s really nothing else to do in Maine. Plus 9 months out of the year females swaddle their flesh in wool and synthetic fleece, heightening nakedness’s attraction. Bottom line is, if this works out I may have to revise my theory about the East Coast, because I don’t think even Key West is ready for topless coffee shops.
Posted in Americana, In the News.
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– January 12, 2009
The New York Times has the curious habit of publishing meta-articles, or news about itself. Like this past Monday, I read an article in the Business section entitled “The Times to Sell Display Ads on the Front Page”. That’s when I flipped my newspaper back to the Front Page to see the advertisement for CBS television across the bottom, which I would not have noticed otherwise. The meta-article slyly throws in justifications like “most major American papers sell front-page display ads, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times” while alluding to The Times’ dire financial situation, “the worst revenue slide since the Depression.” This softened my hardness about reading news alongside crude commerce (Israel bombs Gaza! Watch CSI!) but I still thought publishing an article about its own Front Page was somewhat bizarre.
ANYWAY, speaking of bizarreness in the New York Times, today was Bono’s first column in the Op-Ed section. Several months ago, another meta-article in the New York Times reported that, starting in 2009, Bono from U2 would become a contributing columnist, presumably to attract elusive young subscribers so it can avoid, say, running ads on the Front Page. Now, I’m a current young subscriber, and I can honestly say that none of the current opinion columnists thrill me. I mostly agree with the left-leaning politics (except for warmonging David Brooks) but sometimes my brain outright refuses to actually read an editorial by Paul Krugman entitled “Let’s Get Fiscal” or a Thomas L. Friedman rant about using taxes to mold the perfect society. And Maureen Dowd? Don’t get me started. Bitch is nuts.
Bono is really good at being a rock star, activist, and philanthropist, but is he any good at writing columns? His first effort, entitled “Notes from the Chairman”, is a rambling tribute to Frank Sinatra that reads like a string of words that occurred to Bono while he was drinking. It’s no surprise that the prose of a musician is littered with alliteration, but Bono’s is downright cacophonous: Glass clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessing, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.
Woah. And Bono continues in this wordy manner, throwing in a bit of philosophy in order to lose me completely: Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naivete, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused. Bono, let me tell you want writers depend on: what their readers want to know. Where are you going with this? Did the Times really hire you so you could write about how Frank Sinatra’s voice aged like “years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels”? Isn’t Maureen Dowd pissed off?
Posted in In the News.
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– January 11, 2009
“This could either be the best or worst movie ever,” was my first thought upon hearing the premise of The Wrestler, which stars Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram,” an aging professional wrestler from the 1980s who is still active on the small-fry wrestling circuit in New Jersey, and also stars Marisa Tomei as his love interest Cassidy, an aging stripper who is still active in the VIP room. The Wrestler turned out to be highly entertaining, surprisingly compelling, and deeply poignant movie. And I’m saying that despite the scene involving the staple gun and barbed wire (apparently, wrestling theatrics aren’t all fake.)
I never thought I’d say this, but: Mickey Rourke was magnificent. Rourke plays “The Ram” as a gentle giant, willing to subject his body to anything in order to please the crowds because that’s all he knows what to do. How brilliant, and appropriate, was it to have Rourke and Tomei hanging out in a bar, rocking out to Rat Attack (!!!) and speaking fondly of the 80s as the glory days. It was a rare moment of relaxed comfort in a movie otherwise filled with blood, sweat, tears, destruction, and deli meat.
Superbad was 2007’s teen comedy of the year, earning raves for its profuse and profane laughs as well as its authentic take on the high school experience. And maybe I’m getting old, but… really?!? The gags were juvenile and sometimes gross, the characters were pathetic, and the plot was just stupid. Admittedly, the plot of every teen comedy is stupid, but three geeky sex-obsessed nerds makes everything seem so much stupider. It gets one star because I did laugh. But I could not help but comparing Superbad to the teen comedies I grew up with (Heathers, Dazed and Confused, any movie directed by John Hughes) and thinking how far we’ve fallen as a society if 2 hours of teenaged women objectification is being heralded as an instant classic and Michael Cera is the new John Cusack.
Outsourced, another comedy from 2007, takes a light-hearted and sometimes naive look at a controversial topic. Todd, a manager of a US novelty product company, is sent to India in order to train his replacement at the newly-outsourced call center. Todd is resistant to India at first, but gradually warms to the culture, the customs, and the people… especially one cute Indian co-worker named Asha. The fish-out-of-water laughs at the beginning made up for the dragginess at the ending. Still, it’s hard to get into Outsourced’s feel-good vibe when so many divisive angles of outsourcing were ignored or pooh-poohed.
(Yes, I know it’s 2009, but it seems like Netflix’s ‘Watch Instantly’ line-up favors cheesiness from 2007. So join me here next week when I’ll be reviewing Wedding Daze, Wild Hogs, and the second season of Heroes).
Posted in Review.
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– January 9, 2009
The prospect of writing today’s post brought to mind this classic evasion used by women seeking to avoid intimacy with their lusty mates. I like imagining you, dear reader, desperate for my words, and me winsomely denying you. (Roll over, pull comforter up to my neck, sigh).
Posted in Miscellany.
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– January 8, 2009
“I dreamt that I tried to donate blood,” I told Mr. P this morning as we lounged in bed.
“That’s good, because I had a dream that I lost a finger,” he said. Semi-mock newlywed cooing ensued.
Yes, I had a dream that I attempted to donate blood, probably inspired by an idle thought I had on the acupuncture table yesterday: I’m so acclimated to needles, maybe someday I’ll be able to donate blood!
The dream took place in a large auditorium, filled with people and tables of food. I waited in a long line with two friends to donate blood. We were last in line. We weren’t allowed to eat the food until after we donated our blood, and I was quite concerned that the food would run out. Crowds of blood donors milled around us with their piled plates of pies and sandwiches. I was indignant. When we finally reached the counter, they wouldn’t allow me to donate blood, because I had registered to donate using my maiden name, making me ineligible.
Apparently, the dream was telling me that I’m not ready to donate blood.
Posted in Existence.
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– January 7, 2009
Tonight’s acupuncture appointment was the icing on the cake of tranquility. My endomorphin-jacked body radiated serenity as I floated out of my acupuncturist’s office and into the chilly, slushy Cambridge streets. Nothing fazed me. The sirens, the horns, the slow-moving cellphone gabbers bounced off my consciousness like putty. I waited 10 minutes for a Red Line train with a lazy smile on my face. I walked home on un-shoveled sidewalks against a torrid wind, humming Bob Dylan tunes and scanning porches and bushes for kitty-cats. (I saw one!)
Yet I am not relaxed to the point where I’ll allow today — a Tuesday of no consequence — to slip away without a post…
Posted in Existence.
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– January 6, 2009
