3.925 = three times sterling

Friday metalurgy/GPA jokes. Hilarious. So glad it is the weekend. Nearing the end of the rope. Going to punch people in the face.

Hope everyone memorializes their liver this weekend. Salud!

The doctor is in

A few days ago, me and the boys at work were running lines from Wayne’s World, cause that is just what you do in technical support. We were talking about the corporate sponsor scene – Pizza Hut, Doritos, Reebox, and Pepsi. We were got to Nuprin (Little, Yellow, Different) and realized that none of us had seen Nuprin in years. What had happened to the Nuprin? I asked the google, and the answer (that it was now a proprietary product of CVS and was no longer yellow) turned out to be the cake. The icing? I found this fantastic blog. It is written by a pharmacist somewhere in California. He is fiercely liberal, funny, and dedicated. His writing is hilarious because, like me, he is a misanthrope working in the service industry. That is a tough balance to maintain, particularly when you are trying to save idiots from themselves.

I have spent the last week catching up on his archives. I forwarded the page to my mom, a nurse, because I thought she would appreciate his analyses of the medical system in this country. There have been a few articles that were particularly interesting or poignant, but I liked this one the best.

Old lady comes up to the counter and asks a question. "I broke out in a rash and my doctor told me to get some Benadryl. Is this the right thing?"

Nothing unusual here. There are about 8,000 different types of Benadryl on the market, and if you're not a drug person and find yourself all blotchy and itchy, it's understandable you want to make sure you get the right thing. I answer this very question several times a week. If you find yourself in this type of situation in the future, look for the Benadryl Allergy in the pink box.

Which is exactly what the old lady had in her hand. Yay for her. When I told her that she indeed had the right thing she replied, "Well that's what the pharmacist at K-Mart said too, but since she was a woman, I thought I would ask again."

A woman was telling me that she didn't trust the advice of another woman. You've come a long way indeed baby.

Boy, can I relate. I find that women are more overtly sexist than men. They are incredulous that I, a mere girl, might fix their computer and software programs. On rare occasion, as faithful readers are all aware, I have to play the manager card and explain that not only am I a girl in technical support, I am girl managing a bunch of guys in technical support. Plus, I wear pants and don’t ride side saddle. Aside from the dead squirrel and my tendency to cry at Liberty Mutual commercials, you won’t find much in my temperament that betrays my ovaries. Sigh.

Some shit went down last night, but I am not yet brave enough to face it. I'm content to let it continue to poison me from the inside. Cheerio!

White courtesy telephone

Very busy weekend. I try not to schedule things for all three nights, because I am kinda unsoiciable, but I am really glad I did this weekend.

Friday night, all the kids from work went to Cool River for a wine pairing with the winemaker from Fisher Vineyards. I had saved my $100 for 6 weeks to make sure I could pay (yeah, pay). I was pleasantly surprised when my boss said that dinner was on him. The food was fantastic – five courses. The wine, except for the Chardonnay, was delicious. I can’t afford any of their wines, but I’ll always have Cool River.

Saturday night, I was meeting with the librarians, which is always a blast. We ate pizza, drank beer, and chatted about all manner of political, sociological, and maritime issues – maybe not maritime. We had a great time, and we can’t wait that long to meet up ever again. Perhaps our trivia team, The Imbeciles, can meet up soon.

Sunday night, we were all meeting for Andrea’s birthday at the Traildust steakhouse. We also knew that John was likely going to propose, so we spent the day getting the house in order, so it looked like some place someone might want to be proposed to. The proposal happened, and was accepted, and was a lovely evening for all involved.

Now, I am in planning mode for our crawfish boil in July. Should be lots of fun. I may write about the Phoebe Cates thing, but for the time being, it seems inappropriate. More to come.

Don't worry about dropping your head, it's your chest

Ahh, the always welcome sense of relief when the semester is truly and finally over. I just submitted my last final, sociology 4150, and am enjoying a detox fiction book like I always have to read at the end. This semester? Tolstoy Lied by Rachel Kadish. Interestingly enough, both Villi and I spotted and bought this book in separate trips to Barnes and Noble. She mentioned that it looked familiar and when I went to place it on the shelf, it was already there.

I noticed today, for some reason, that I don’t write in margins of books, I only dog-ear. I have come up with some possible reasons for this.

1. Fear – I was/am afraid that putting my words and thoughts next to those of a published author is rude or offensive. Disturbing because it indicates that my fear of offending extends to inanimate objects in my possession. Do I believe that Douglas Coupland’s car might break down in front of my house, he’d ask to borrow the phone, flip through my worn copy of Microserfs, and mock my reactions?

2. Dirty Dancing – Robby’s character wants to lend Baby his copy of Atlas Shrugged, after telling her that “some people matter and some people don’t.” He tells her she will like it but to return it because he has notes in the margin. Did my young, unconscious self equate writing in margins to being a douchebag? Disturbing because it indicates that pop culture is even more internalized than I thought.

3. Surprise – Part of me likes going back into a book with no specific memory. Reading it from whatever new vantage point I have climbed to since I last read it. Maybe the margin writing distracts from new magic in the book? Disturbing because this points more to my own fear of finding myself stupid on the return trip.

4. No pencil – self-explanatory.

This is the line from Tolstoy Lied that made me want to post something.

“Sitting here beside him, sipping room-temperature beer, I feel: This place is the center. This sofa is the exact center of the known universe, all neighboring systems quietly reshaping to make way for the heavy pull between us.”

I declare

I sometimes space out on Valentine’s day and imagine what it would be like to receive some obscenely large arrangement of flowers, or possibly a signed copy of my favorite book (because my boyfriend really gets me in my fantasy). And around Christmas, I wish I had someone to read with in front of a fire. I imagine we take turns reading a Christmas Carol, or maybe just How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and this Mr. Wonderful probably has a funny Grinch voice, or he mimics carving the who beast when he reads it. In the spring, I long for someone to walk with, drink wine with, share inside jokes with-someone who would stop in a park and tie my shoe for me (or point out the glass and walk me around it a la Lloyd Dobbler).

Although alone, I am not lonely. I take comfort in the fact that I don’t really need a boyfriend. I’m happy that when I get one, we will be free from the silly roles that people have to play. I enjoy action films. I pump my own gas and kill my own spiders.

I am energized by the prospect of taking care of myself, or I was until today.

This afternoon, if I had a boyfriend, I would have called him in my crying, high-pitched girl voice. I would have asked him to come right over. When he asked what was wrong, I would have squealed about it being too horrible and to come right away. He, responding in some innate, genetic action spurred by the instinctual memory of 1,000,000 hysterical women before me, would have rushed over in a panic to see what was wrong. He would have found me perched at the top of my staircase, trembling and pointing. “Down there,” I would have whispered.

He would have charged down the stairs, finding my beagle, Megra, gleefully eviscerating a dead squirrel. He would have handled the whole mess, possibly without his shirt on. I would have fluttered my eyelashes and sighed, “My hero.”

But that isn’t what happened at all. Instead, I had to deal with the dead squirrel and a beagle that did not want to let it go. I won’t describe the squirrel except to say there wasn’t much left by the time I got to him. I did manage to bag the squirrel and get him up to the trash without touching him, but not without a very serious case of the willies and a few powerful, involuntary shudders.

I often wondered what it would take for me to wish away 150 years of feminism and suffrage. The answer: a dead, half-eaten squirrel.

Look at her, she doesn’t even look guilty.

Note to self: remember the Pheobe Cates anecdote

I have been reading Mark Morford’s op-ed column in the SF Gate for years now. Sometimes, when he rags on the Midwest, or the mindless, or the unhealthy, or the spiritually numb, I see bits of myself in my column. I usually feel something close to shame, the kind of shame that makes you swear off Rock of Love and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and PerezHilton.com. Today’s column starts in the same vein; Mark is talking about the cognitive surplus we have in this country and how most of us blow right through that watching TV. He goes on to talk about Wikipedia taking nearly 100 million hours of work. Wikipedia, non-peer reviewed reference site that it is, represents a successful collaborative use of some of that cognitive surplus.

Then, he changes gears again. He says that Wikipedia may be a marvel of socialism and technology, but he doesn’t feel confident that we can ever be a truly collaborative culture because most often the by product of collaboration is groupthink. Nasty, evil groupthink.

The examples are legion, eternal, painful: You want to destroy a unique TV show? Run it by lots of focus groups. Want to maul a good film? Hire a team to write the script.

And here is where my post really gets started. Villi and I were sitting on the couch a few nights ago talking about something that led to something else. I don’t know how we got to Pretty in Pink, but I mentioned that the original ending had Andie and Duckie ending up together, which was really the natural order. Apparently, when they ran it by focus groups (big-haired, gum-smacking 14 year olds, I imagine) they started booing at the end. Andie shouldn’t be with sweet, kind, reverent Duckie. She should be with the rich, good looking (if you’re into the sunken-cheek, feathered-hair awkwardness that is Andrew McCarthy) boy who treated her like crap and rolled over to his parents' elitism rather than defend Andie. What a message to the girls in America! Why not just have her end up with James Spader’s Stef. If she really wanted to feel inferior for the whole of her relationship, I think that would be the way to go.

So, we checked out my Pretty in Pink DVD and it listed the original ending as one of the special features. Unfortunately, tt didn’t really have the original ending, just a bunch of commentary by the cast and crew about why the change was made. Molly Ringwald admitted that if the original Duckie (Robert Downing Jr.) had been Duckie she would have been okay with the original ending. When Jon Cryer was cast, she wanted the movie to change. What is that about? You’re an actress; it means pretend. Only Annie Potts seemed appropriately outraged at the change, and I blame that stupid focus group for all of this.

So far, only my friend Beth has agreed with the original ending.

the ex-showgirl wife of donald phelps

Spent the weekend listening to Carla Bruni's Quelqu'un m'a dit, annoyed that a former model would dare to make such lovely music. It was on par with discovering that Cindy Crawford was offered a full-ride chemical engineering scholarship to Northwestern University. Pretty people shouldn't be good at stuff!

I didn't even connect that this was the woman who recently married French President Nicholas Sarkozy - the model he left his wife for. I'm clueless sometimes (all the time...tout le temps).

Get confident, stupid!

I notice that most success stories in the blogosphere fall into two categories: themed (Julia and Julie) or highly personal and potentially embarrassing (the washingtonienne). I MUST stop to say that it must be amazing to decide to write a blog about cooking your way through “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and then, several years later, Amy Adams and Meryl Streep are signed up to make a movie out of your NYT bestselling book.

I never intended to be a commercial blogger. I wish I could chalk it up to lack of time or patience, but really, I suffer from a lack of content. My life is boring and I don’t always have a lot going on, so I don’t always have a lot to say. I decided, however, if I was ever going to do a commercial blog, I would do it about commercials (or adverts as the classy English folk say). I think that commercials are terribly interesting because they tread the line between commerce and pop art. I'm not high-brow; I might be barely middlebrow. Even so, the collision of artistic endeavor and commodity is fascinating. I was reading about the Murakami installations at the MOCA and now the Brooklyn Museum and how both contained a free standing Louis Vuitton store smack dab in the middle. It emphasized the fact that there is a serious infiltration of marketing into our lives, and it seems to be getting more intrusive. I fully anticipate that my funeral will be co-sponsored by Stolichnaya and Skechers (It’s the S).

Not only that, but commercials are one of the most prolific ways we reinforce and create culture. There is so much to see – the latent bigotry, the truly surreal, the falsely surreal, etc. I think I could crank out a couple of sizeable blogs a week about commercials. I would start with this Skittles commercial



Possibly the saddest commercial in the history of the world.

In a world of chaos

I have always been jealous of Villi and the uninterrupted seven year archive that is her life. My blogs have always been scatter shot, poorly conceived, and disconnected. Because of this, and my tendency to purge things from life every so often, I have these gaps in my life where nothing is recorded. It always kinda gets me down, knowing that I don't have a complete record, that there is only half my skeleton for the data archaeologists to pull up.

To be perfectly honest, this all started today when I thought about this fantastic email correspondence I had with this boy about 7 years ago and how it is gone forever. I started to think I should revise my policy on data storage. Even if something is painful, or the writing is painfully bad and causes me embarrassment, I shouldn't just delete these parts of my life. They are still part of me.

So, the semester is almost over and the downtime between semesters always makes me itchy. I usually have to assign myself some giant project to keep myself out of trouble. If I had the money, I would work on my media server, but I am broke-ass broke. Instead, I am going to try to piece together the fragments of my life, pulling my writing for as many scattered archives as possible and uniting them under the unified www.amateurnacho.com

We will see how that goes.

Going nowhere

I started this entry, but it seemed to die in my arms. I'll just post what I have, instead of deleting it. It seems a waste of a paragraph.

I have been a girl all my life. It seems a silly statement, but I am attempting to establish my credentials. I want it known that I have almost 30 years of experience being a girl. And I don’t say woman and I don’t say female, because they never seem to conjure the right image in my mind: the former seems a political distinction, the latter a biological one. Girl always seemed to encompass everything, the politics, the biology, and the cultural of receiving two X chromosomes. I also like “girl” because it is so mutable. Yes, girl means young woman, but there is so much more to it. We tack it on to every conceivable personality and hobby – rock girl, glamour girl, shy girl, drama girl, popular girl, nerdy girl – and while each of these are gendered, but it is more than that. It becomes a way to identify the tribes, so to speak. Girl lets you try on different hats, be all the other girls you want to be. It is a very liberating term because you are free to interpret it as you wish. There is a problem with girl, though.

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