Killing Our Stars Slowly

We're a pretty dramatic society. We throw the word 'tragedy' around with relative ease. Only in the American consciousness can we follow a story about a crazed astronaut driving over a thousand miles wearing a diaper en route to kick the ass of her husband's fling with the word "tragic." I wonder if the Greeks would disagree with our diagnosis of the current American 'tragedy' du jour, Anna Nicole Smith. Aristotle defined a tragedy by three distinct characteristics:

1.) The plot must have distinct point of change in which a discovery is made, and there must be suffering.

Imagine for a second that Anna fits the criteria for Aristotle's first requisite. We'll call the death of her son the point of change in her twisted plotline. Obviously she suffered immensely from this. But I have to wonder if the definition of suffering becomes clouded when that suffering is masked by enough pills to kill a small horse. Isn't suffering part of the human condition, an emotion and a state of being we are naturally supposed to experience and embrace, albeit begrudgingly?

Next,
2.) The main character must be good, appropriate, realistic and consistent.

Anna Nicole may have been good at shocking people and consistently inebriated. But insisting that you and your 87-year-old husband bang constantly is neither realistic nor appropriate. If Anna is realistic and appropriate than Trump is bohemian and humble.

Lastly,
3.) The people must be able to sympathize with him.

For some reason, the American public feels like it can sympathize with celebrities who live so far off the mark from the majority of our daily lives. Can any of us really sympathize with Anna Nicole? Sure some of us have battled inner demons, drugs, alcohol abuse, the loss of a child. I'll bet there are a few chicks out there that married a soon-to-be-corpse to inherit a fortune who behold Anna as a role model. But what thread of commonality runs between Anna Nicole Smith and a housewife in Illinois, a young professional on Long Island, my 86-year-old grandmother?

The answer is nothing. Anna Nicole is a manufactured public icon. There is nothing remotely genuine or real about her. She changed her name, her body, her image and her life to 'please' us all. And we gobbled it up. We were fascinated by her ability to become famous and constantly make us drop our jaws in shock and disgust. We wanted her to be a disaster--strung out, pathetic and helpless. And now we're all just rubbernecking at the absolute disaster we all had a hand in creating.

I really think the death of Anna Nicole Smith was not so much a tragedy, but a manslaughter by the American public.


...And in a twist of well-timed irony, Ms. Britney "Not to be outdone" Spears, excuse me SHEARS needed to remind us all that not every synthetic pop star that we binged on, used up and tossed away is dead, yet. Though I’d be lying if I said that I didn't see a bottle of pills and overdose in her future. And who knows, maybe even a paternity test or two. If were lucky.

Top Ten Things I'll Miss About Thanksgiving with the Joneses

I’m completely apathetic about work today. I’m supposed to meet a deadline and I’m extremely behind. Instead of explaining the intricacies of the predicament I’m in, I’ll use a sports analogy. Today is game day and I’ve got a center fielder, catcher, short stop and a DH. That's all. The rest of the team is conspicuously missing, and I’ve got a GM breathing down my neck.

Peanuts, get your peanuts here!

Instead of rectifying the situation, I will take a bad situation and make it worse. Work? Nah. Time to blog.

Next week is Thanksgiving, and for the first time in my life I will not be spending the holiday with my family. This year I’ll be in LA for turkey day and I just realized the Top Ten Things I Will Miss about Thanksgiving with the Joneses:

10.) Great Aunt Bessie. This is not a joke. I really have an Aunt Bessie who is roughly a million years old. Aunt Bess is suffering from the effects of time, what doctors call dementia. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a loved one suffer from dementia. On a daily basis it’s pretty awful, but throw a nice tablecloth down, a giant bird full of tryptophan and a few glasses of pinot noir, and it’s incredibly entertaining.

9.) Hors d'oeuvres. My family loves the hors. We usually have about 7 trays of various hors d'oeuvres before dinner--and there are only 7 of us there. You do the math. It’s actually kinda sick. I consistently fill up on pigs-in-a-blanket though I insist I hate hot dogs. Maybe I’m suffering from dementia. I’ll miss the gluttonous buffet of hors d'oeuvres. This year I’ve traded them in for: There’s some HORS in this house!

8.) Uncle David Hits the Bottle. Thanksgiving is a day for my Uncle David to let loose. Of course, he works at Sears, and since Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days of the year, he has to get up early for work on Friday. So Uncle David gets drunk early. At 12:30 in the afternoon you can expect Uncle D to be on his 4th gin & tonic and real happy to see you. By 4:30 he’s saying real weird shit and asking you to accompany him outside while he chain smokes 4 cigarettes and you glare through the window wishing you were talking to Aunt Bessie about how much she hates black people.

7.) Ping Pong. It is a Thanksgiving tradition to play ping pong in the basement. Despite the fact that we’ve all been playing for many, many years, we all stink. We’re awful. If we get more than three hits in succession, it’s as if Wimbledon has erupted downstairs. This year I had hoped to incorporate some Maria Sharapova grunts into my sets, ah well. Maybe next year.

6.) Where’s Jigs? Uncle Jimmy?!! For every Thanksgiving I can recall, my father has inquired, “Where’s Jigs?” Jigs was my Aunts’ dog who died before I was even born. The math doesn’t even make sense but my Dad finds it wildly hilarious and my Aunt finds it annoying. The same scenario goes for Uncle Jimmy who died about 19 years ago. Without question, right before grace my Father will exclaim with feigned worry in his voice, “Where’s Uncle Jimmy?!!” The reaction he wants always follows: Aunt Bess gets confused because she thinks Uncle Jimmy may really be hiding in the basement, my other Aunt gets annoyed at my Dad, the children giggle, my granny exclaims, “OH, you’re awful!!!!,” and my Mother gives that disapproving Russell, you’re an asshole (but I really think you’re funny) look.

(a)At the mention of grace I realized that a part of me will miss the traditional: “Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub!” that my Dad will try to pass off as a sensible “Grace.”

5.) The gross factor. My other aunt has a knack for blurting out grotesque statements at the dinner table. These statements usually involves the workings of her digestive system, or my Aunt Bessie’s digestive system. The last time I had lunch with her, just as I was about to bite into my spinach salad, she told me “I can’t eat that stuff. Lettuce gives me the runs."


4) Get a job! This is not necessarily Thanksgiving specific. Every time we are all around a dinner table, my Father tells my 95 year old dementia-suffering Aunt to, “Get a job!”

3.) You want some hot gravy? A schism exists in my family which divides us to the very core. One (sane) faction enjoys their gravy piping hot--the other (obviously insane) faction prefers cool gravy. Have you ever seen cold gravy? Its gelatinous meat flavored pudding. Actually—strike that. I won’t miss the gravy.

2.) Dessert is an extension of the hors d’oeuvres tradition for the Joneses. 7 people=4 pies. Aunt Bess gets her own mince meat pie. Have you ever seen mince meat pie? It looks like a can of Alpo dog food scooped into a Betty Crocker pre-made crust. Aunt Bess can keep her pie. So that leaves 6 people for 3 pies: Apple, Pumpkin & Lemon Meringue. All homemade--all delicious. That is… until my Aunt with said exclaimed digestion problems uses her fat fingers to scoop out the slices. “Better Leverage,” she says with her finger in her mouth before she dives in to serve another piece. Mmmm, apple pie & backwash.

1.) The car ride home. This is legendary. It’s like scenes from a dysfunctional (loving) family. Exclamations like “Jerry, I don’t care if she’s family—your cousin is a total asshole!!!!” can be heard for miles. Flatulence. There’s lots of flatulence being released in the car (mostly from my Father and my grandmother). Granny is more of a ‘silent but deadly’ kinda gal. But Dad, well, he enables the window lock so we can’t get fresh air, and laughs maniacally all the way home.

The Devil Wears Atkins

I am fully convinced my boss is a cyborg, sent from the future to destroy me. I have never met a human being that annoys me more than her. She had to have been assembled in hell. In fact, here’s how to make my boss, L. Take Lurch from the Addams family, give him a tire around his waist and saggy boobs. Stick Michael Bolton’s finger in the socket, shave his hair off and paste it on female Lurch in uneven patches. Remember to leave a couple strands sticking straight up on the top of her head. Combine Fog Horn Leg Horn’s projection and The Nanny’s voice, and then sprinkle a little Long Island magic and BOOM. My boss.

Now, of all the weird crap I have to sit through with a stoic look on my face, pretending I’m not bothered, the weirdest of all has got to be the food. I’ve suffered through her beef shots during meetings, show and tell, baby talk, complete and utter idiocy. But I cannot take her eating habits. Daily (and if I’m unfortunate enough, twice a day), I have to watch her ingest foul smelling and horrid foods while she informs me what she is eating. As if I cannot see that she is eating a piece of gravlax, I get to hear “Erin I’m eating gravlax” while she chews. With her mouth full. This week she started a no-carb diet which will make her, in her words, “waste away.” I can only pray this is true. I’ve decided to keep a weekly recording of the food she brings into work. It’s more for cathartic reasons than your entertainment. If I don’t get this out, I’m just gonna burst.

Highlights of this week include:

You ate the whole... wheel of cheese? How'd you do that? Heck, I'm not even mad; that's amazing!

Tuesday was Cubed Cheese. L appeared for our morning meeting with an entire bag of cubed cheese for her breakfast. And not just a bag of cubed cheese, the bag of cubed cheese. The Food Emporium bought, Kraft re-sealable cubed cheese. And she ate the whole bag. I googled the nutrition facts: a bag of Kraft cheese has 7 servings. 7! By my calculations that means L’s breakfast consisted of:
840 calories
70 grams of fat
120 grams of cholesterol
1680 grams of sodium
49 grams of saturated fat, which by the way is 245% of the saturated fat of a normal daily intake

That egg smells like a fart
This is an actual e-mail I received from my co-worker when L was eating hard boiled eggs, whole. She ate 5 hard boiled eggs for breakfast in no more than 7 bites. Fart smell wafting out of her full mouth, “I can’t talk to you right now, I’m eating my hard boiled eggs,” she told me.

Get your hot dogs!
Yesterday we had delicious cake for November birthdays. L could not have cake so she opted for a cold hot dog with no bun. The bunless dog was consumed with no plate, and held like a microphone while she loomed over me informing everyone in earshot, “Look what I’m eating, cause I can’t have cake. A hot dog, isn’t that funny? Isn’t that so funny?”

“Yeah it is, it really, really is,” I said flatly as I brushed the chewed pieces of hotdog out of my hair.


I’ve never ordered breakfast before!
Yesterday morning L ordered an omelet with ‘a side of 3 cups of lettuce’ for breakfast from a nearby deli. She was delighted with her ability to a.) know that delis serve breakfast b.) know she was hungry c.) order breakfast. She was fascinated by the process and thrilled by the results. She told the entire office.


Stay tuned for next week. She will probably come into work with a live cow.

The Question of the Day is:

Which axis of evil is more terrifying?

The Scientific Method to a Better Commute

Fact: I don’t take myself very seriously. But when random strangers on the subway get a hard-on on my ass, and then touch my ass, I start to get real serious.

Observations: This has now happened to me twice in my life. I’m fairly certain this puts me in an elite class of women who can call themselves experts on the subject. Kind of like MENSA for the sexually violated. Based on my expert opinion, the most plaguing aspect of this situation is the fact that I am so absorbed in my own world that I’m not sure exactly how long there was a boner on my ass before I realized there was a boner on my ass. This is very troubling to me. Can I really be that engrossed in the hustle and bustle of commuting to not immediately notice a 6 foot 4 inch, 250 lb gorilla’s gun digging into my hip the second it does so? What the hell else is going on around me on a daily basis that I’m missing?

Hypothesis: New Yorker’s have a threshold for stimuli like no other demographic group. The activity of the subway is sometimes overwhelming, and yet I have headphones on while I’m reading a book while thinking about where I’m going to buy my coffee this morning because I’m smelling some sort of a hazelnut aroma in front of me and to be honest, I’m sick of my usual morning haute. With all my senses engaged, how am I supposed to notice the cock against my back?

Conclusion: Frankly, this is unacceptable. I should always notice a cock against my ass and a giant hand cupping the other cheek. I am cutting back on my commuting accouterments. I think I need to pay closer attention to the things that really matter in life: The way rays of sun pierce through the spaces between the buildings in the morning, the sounds of the city, the faces of humanity--specifically the smug face of the man whose dick is pressed against my ass.