hypocrite

i scoffed at this person's postsecret when i first saw it. i saved it to my desktop, planning to post it and blog about how ridiculous it is.

and then a voice in my head said to me, "everybody's got their something." it's true.

i cried when carrie found out big was engaged to natasha, that stick figure with no soul.
i cried when vivian rode away from edward's hotel in the grey limo.
i cry every time time billy elliot gets his acceptance letter.
i cry when i hear don henley sing 'forgiveness.'

you do it, too. i know you do. your something is just different.


maybe we cry about the "silly" stuff, the fake stuff, so that we won't cry about the real stuff. the hard stuff. the stuff we can't do anything about. like news of an uncle's death ruining a family vacation. or an unresolved fight with a close friend. or the final end of a tumultuous relationship last summer. not a tear.


while we're on the topic, i'll share with you an old favorite that i've been holding onto since circa 2004... just in case you missed it back then:

enough is enough

this morning i decided to count the myriad chinese take-out plasticontainers i've accumulated since moving into my new apartment. just because.

and it turns out, i've spent at least $132 on take-out in only 5 weeks, and that's assuming i didn't throw any of the free tupperware away! considering how cheap chinese food is, that's a lot of food. and a lot of carbs. and a lot of grease.

so that's it. no more Jin House for me. so sad... it's like telling a child he can never again go to the playground. telling a jewish girl she's not allowed to go shoe-shopping. telling a tranny she can't stand on the corner of 13th and Locust!

but i need to stress one thing: this is not a boycott. just because i'm not going to Jin House, doesn't mean you shouldn't. by all means, order away! if only so they won't go out of business due to the loss of my frequent orders...

as for me, i'll be spending these last 3 weeks eating tofu and eggs and almonds, all the while sternly reminding myself that my morbidly obese body is not yet ready for the islands of the Caribbean.

and between now and then, if you and i happen to chat, feel free to ask me what i had for dinner. and if i admit, "sweet an sour chickie," you have my permission to verbally spank me.

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totally in the mood for some foie gras

and the crazy thing is, i've never even tried it!

i want it so badly right now just because it's getting such rave reviews.

and by "rave reviews," i don't mean by a food critic. i mean by the group of about 10 protesters that stands on my block about once a week with bull horns, screaming, "BOYCOTT VALANNI! FOIE GRAS! MURDER MEAT!" outside the posh neighborhood eatery Valanni. (i mean, sure, i've wanted to boycott the restaurant, too, but mostly just because their drinks are $15 each and weeeee-eeeak!)

but today, as i sit in my living room, trying to study contract/sales law, the constant screaming and chanting is really distracting me. i can't imagine how distracted Valanni's happy hour crowd, sitting right there beside the protesters and just inside the huge open windows, must be. they probably can't even enjoy their $12 syrup with just a medicine drop of vodka in it! INJUSTICE!

and i can't help but think how delicious foie gras must be, for it to cause such a stir and yet for restaurants throughout this city to continue serve it, knowing animal freak-- i mean -- rights groups will show up to scream and drive away customers. that must be some damn good liver. (and i don't eat liver. or much meat at all, for that matter!)

and also, i'm no animal hater. i love all living things, so long as they're soft, fun, clean, and socially beneficial to humans. but let's just be honest: animals are animals. if they could, those geese would be eating our livers too! in a heartbeat! and if he were capable, even my sweet, little catticus would chase down an antelope and tear it limb from limb... hm... actually, i think he might be capable of that...

but back to my point. that restaurants like the one on my block are willing to suffer the intolerable, annoying, offensive, distracting, bar-studying-ruining screams of some PETA freaks with no happy hours of their own to attend on a lovely, summer friday evening means a lot to me. and a quick glance at Valanii's menu shows that the evil food item isn't exactly a staple of its offerings. it appears ONCE on the menu. and knowing that place, it's probably overpriced anyway. so it would be easier just to take it off the effing menu, right?

but if we take every cruel food off the menu of every restaurant these animal rights groups protest (and they would, eventually. every restaurant. because, like i said: nothing better to do), before long we would all be forced to be vegans. we all know the beef industry is terribly inhumane. delicious veal is totally out of the question. and poultry! don't get me started, don't EVEN get me started on poultry farms!

and if you take the argument far enough (which PETA and similar groups do), killing ANY animal is inhumane. soon we can't even eat fish. we'll be forced to eat human babies from remote villages in the Midwest! it's a slippery slope, my friend.



anyway... who wants to go to Valanni and try the foie gras this weekend? let me know!

i'm hearing rave reviews!

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i don't know what came over me...

but just like that, color came back into my living room.


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it pays to argue

"You can't argue with a law student." that's what a friend of mine said the other day as i told him my long and boring story of my half-couch debacle.

i'm not sure if it's hubris or whether some of us (not just law students) are simply more logical and more comfortable with arguing than other people, but there's one thing i'm sure about: it pays to think you're always right.


yesterday i found a large package beside my mailbox. addressed to me, and labeled "Open Promptly! New book!" but otherwise mysterious, with no return address or sender.

fearing it might be an emergency re-publication of one of my BarBri books and that i might need to re-learn entirely an area of law, i tore the package open. wide open.

only to find a 21-day free trial of fitness books from my friends at Men's Health. i would be billed automatically upon failing to return them in a timely manner.

bull shit.

if you want me to enjoy your product, fine. give it to me. but don't give me an effing trial period, at the end of which i have to pay to send the ish back to you, which i'm almost certainly going to a) forget or b) simply be too lazy to complete. and that's what they're banking on. they're hoping i shrug my shoulders, say "i'd rather spend $60 dollars than find time to walk to the post office and pay $5 to mail these back," and place the guide to fitness on a dusty bookshelf somewhere, never to be used.

effing publishers.

and while i'm on the topic, can i just point out that if you have to guilt or trick someone into buying your product, it must not be worth buying. anything i actually want, i'll go buy myself. don't send me something i didn't order unless it's free! you hear that publishers?!?!

this happened to my mom once. a vacuum salesman dropped off a fancy $600 vacuum and told her to use it for a week, she'd never look back. just call him if she didn't want it. after vacuuming every surface (including walls) in our house at least 9 times, she called the company. no answer. no message. same the next day. and the next.

finally she figured out they were avoiding her call, so she used the neighbor's phone. her call was promptly and courteously answered. her reply: "come get your vacuum cleaner now. i'm leaving it outside, and it looks like it's going to rain." the salesman showed up that afternoon.


but back to my free trial... i was livid. so i waited out the annoying on-hold jazz music (which i believe only makes the waiting customer less patient), and i listened to the customer service pre-recorded assurances that my call was important to them, and i became more angry as the minutes passed. and when Joan at customer service picked up, i was ready to let the c-u-next-tuesday word fly. fortunately i didn't have to.

i just had to be a little patient, and a lot stubborn. this is what atticus, who was sitting beside me trying to calm me down, heard:

i never ordered these.

i didn't sign up for that.

NO.

NO, actually, i didn't agree to that when i ordered my magazine subscription.

no, it doesn't make a difference if you reduce the price to $45 dollars.

so, what, i'm supposed to tape it back up and write RETURN TO SENDER on it? there's not even a return address.

i shouldn't have to pay to return this to you.

because i didn't order it!

...

yes, please send me a postage-paid envelope to send it back to you. i think that's a great idea, Joan. thank you.

...

no, my girlfriend or wife would NOT like a subscription to Women's Health.


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head up, young person!

a little encouragement from a friend who's in the same boat.

slavery to a pattern

We wrapped up all our thoughts we had ground over the summer like Colombian coffee beans, hoping to come up with a resolution that would make the future tolerable.


in an attempt to quiet my mind during these past few nights of unexplained insomnia, i've picked some less-worn paperbacks off my bookshelf. normally i'd re-read my faves, but i wanted something new -- "new" meaning something i haven't read 5 times.

i started with Jonathan Loved David, which i'll tell you about later, when it suits my homosexual-christian agenda, but not now...

the past two nights i've read an old -- well, i won't call it an "old favorite," because it was never really a favorite. it's just an experience.

The Mixquiahuala Letters. (if that words is upsetting you, it's pronounced something like meesh-kee-ah-wall-ah). the book came into my life as extracurricular reading suggested by my favorite lit professor. when i expressed to her my fascination with author Ana Castillo, we instantly bonded. in retrospect, the repressed (because of where we were) feminist in her must have been overjoyed to have opened the ears of a white male at the conservative christian college to a strong feminist voice like Castillo's.

i loved the book. it's comprised of 38 short letters from one lesbo to her best friend, over the course of two decades. i call the narrator a lesbo only because, if you met her, it's the first thing you would think. a single, 35-year-old artist who smokes a lot, loathes men, and obsesses over the summer she met her best friend. through the letters she re-lives their best and worst times together, their time apart, and their travels through mexico, starting one summer in Mixquiahuala.

when i returned the book to my professor, telling her i loved it, her first question was, "which path did you choose?" you see, the author intended the chapters to be read, not chronologically, but according to one of several sequences she outlines at the outset of the novel. the reader has three choices:

For the Conformist
For the Cynic
For the Quixotic

guess which one i chose.

go ahead, guess.



i chose the quixotic sequence, which cuts out about a dozen of the letters. i marked them off and refused to even glance at them as i read. i chose the same path the past few nights. partly because they were already marked, but partly because it was my only option.


and now i realize that despite reaching the final, hopeful end of the path i chose, i don't know how the story truly ends. i know up to the third-to-last chapter, but what happens to the women after that? i simply never read. i mean, i can't. i shouldn't. i'm not a conformist, and i'm definitely not a cynic.

i wonder, which would you choose?

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welcome to our generation

overheard at starbucks


girl: are you friends with that kid?
guy: on what?
girl: what... what do you mean, 'on what?'
guy: you mean on myspace or facebook?
girl: no, like -- IN LIFE. are you friends with him?


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cute

postsecret.

speaking ill of the dead

we all know we're not supposed to, but what if that's the only thing to say about the deceased?

since watching the news in my posh hotel room on the gigantic flat-screen tv yesterday (i know, i need to get over it... it was just so nice), i've been paying attention to all the news and blog posts about senator jesse helms. and they all seem to have one thing in common.

how do i describe it? it's not malicious, yet it's far from sorrow. it's simply honest. a racist, bigoted, old curmudgeon died. and he happened to have been an important public figure. therefore, the media must report, even if there's nothing positive to say....

even fox news noted the senator's bitter opposition to civil rights for blacks and gays, as well as helms' fight against AIDS research, which he believed resulted from "unnatural and disgusting" behavior. (he all but said homos deserved AIDS.)


i can't help but think about my grandfather, who, like helms, was a bitter, mean, old fart with an opinion on everything, an unsurpassed church attendance record, and a horrible drinking problem. had a black man or an obvious homosexual ever walked onto his farm, a gun would've appeared soon after.

when my mother was cleaning out the house and preparing for the estate sale, she found my grandfather's Bible. huge, old, full of notes and cards. and she told me i could have it if i'd like it. while i appreciated the gesture, i quickly said "no, thank you." and then i spoke ill of the dead. to his own daughter.

"sorry, but i don't really want anything that was important to him. i don't want the negative energy connected to him and his belongings." in retrospect, i can't believe i said it. to my mom. and at a terrible time. but i did say it, and whether she thought i was crazy or not, she simply said, "okay." a part of me thinks she agreed.

i wasn't sad that he died, and i can think of nothing positive to say about him. so maybe it's better to say nothing... but that's not my style. i'd rather report the facts.


but i won't speak aloud the thought that crosses my mind as i read about the senator's death, the same thought on my mind when my grandfather died a couple years ago: good riddance.

there's just a tiny bit less hate in the world today than there was yesterday. i have no problem with that.


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buddha says...

Let your love flow outward through the universe, to its height, its depth, its broad extent -- a limitless love, without hatred or enmity.
Then as you stand or walk, sit or lie down, as long as you are awake, strive for this with a one-pointed mind.
Your life will bring heaven to earth.



lovely.

important firsts

first "weekend" away together, inter alia.



"and then there is another important first: the first time you realize, this really might be something. and just like that, we moved out of the present and into our future."

-satc. carrie.


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Oompa Loompa doompadee doo

I've got another puzzle for you...


as i pack for a short, holiday-weekend trip to the beach (or as philly natives say, "goin' down da shore -- hey! are yous guys goin'? huh?"), i feel compelled to share with you my plight -- partly as a caution to you, and partly just to vent.

the short version: don't get a spray tan.

the longer version: what was i thinking?

after years of avoiding the sun, you can imagine how pale i am. so pale, in fact, that the thought of going onto the beach in july upset me. in early may, i might have passed as a "first time on the beach this season"-er. but by july, anyone who looks like this is clearly a library nerd who never sees the light of day, except when he catches a bus at 7:45 am.

after a friend of mine got a fairly successful spray tan, i thought it was a great idea. a perfect summer tan without the fuss of wasting time in the sun, damaging precious cancer-free skin cells, and aging prematurely? sign me up!

today i'm singing a different tune. i am an oompa loompa. and let me tell you, that sh*t set in QUICK! the roasted-almond-brown slut at hollyood tans said it would be about 8 to 12 hours before i would see the color. but my blank-canvas skin soaked up the supposedly invisible spray like newly-plastered drywall splashed with red wine.

by the time i got home, my hands and feet were brown. my toes looked like those of the guys who live on the sidewalks of 12th street. and my hands -- oh boy, my hands! brown as Whoopi, and NOT coming off. the loofah didn't work. soap didn't work. finally, in an ingenious move for which i verbally pat myself on the back, i emptied 1/4 tube of arm & hammer whitening toothpaste into my palms and scrubbed for dear life. and it worked!

so as i sit here, fearing the hue my skin might appear in the bright daylight of the jersey shore, i have to caution you. THINK before you spray tan, ok? promise me?

and while i would normally declare a personal boycott, post a facebook rant about hollywood tans, and maybe even dedicate a revised version of kelly clarkson's Never Again to that horrible tanning salon ("NEVER AGAIN will I trust you....NEVER AGAIN will I spray tan... NEVERRRR"), i can't promise that i'm writing it off forever.

i mean, what's the alternative? being pasty and white in a society plagued with an unattainable standard of tan, youthful beauty? or even worse, going out into the sun... like, regularly... without SPF 45 on? shaaa... right! as if.

maybe i'll call HT and complain. or at least ask for a free spray tan... for the next time i'm going to the beach.



p.s. i'll update you later to let you know if anyone notices my clementine hue, or makes a comment about a bad spray tan, or asks me to work in his chocolate factory.

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they say you can never go home again...

and those are words i live by.

but occasionally i think about the grassy hills and dusty dirt roads and winding streams of that place i return to only for the christmas gifts and to end the guilt trips from my mother.

today i'm thinking about home in summer. so quiet. so calm. i should probably be there studying for the bar exam. this nostalgia will, of course, pass soon. but my ma, novice digi-photographer that she is, sent me some photos today, and for her i'll allow myself just a few minutes more...

here's a view from her window. car window, that is.

what are you, person?

dear danity kane -- or, dear aubrey o'day, rather. since you're the only one who seems to have a personality or the ability to speak on your own:

i'm writing to let you know that, despite good intentions and strong motives, i cannot dislike you. i've tried. i've explained to myself why i should not listen to your saucy singles, why you're not real artists, why the titties are probably faaaake. and yet i've failed.

as you well know, you are a musical group with no depth whatsoever. you were thrown together into a mixing bowl reality tv show and whipped up for the sole purpose of making money. music is simply a byproduct of that process for you and your creator-god, to whom we shall refer as diddy. because i guess that's what he wants to be called these days. praise his name in the highest.

you girls have no interpersonal relationship aside from what mtv has captured/scripted/produced. you've weathered no storms together, except a couple break-ups (which were bound to happen, because that's how mtv deals with ex-boyfriends back home. we all know that, after 98 seasons of the real world).

and i'm pretty sure that each of you girls has just as much personal depth as the group itself. i mean, you haven't survived a meth addiction like fergie ferg! and you didn't have a painful childhood and the resulting yo-yo weight loss/gain problems with which janet struggles every month (during which time she gains, and subsequently loses, approximately 75 pounds). same goes for my gurl kelly clarkson; i love that bulimic angel. and you're not well-rounded like karina (see below!), who -- well, i don't know anything about karina, except that she's got some hot pipes and probably a very incredible story to tell on oprah someday.

and then there's danity kane. you girls came from middle class homes where the worst problem you faced were alcoholic, workaholic fathers and mothers who were extremely critical of everything you did. even when you succeeded. well, welcome to the dollhouse -- er. i mean, welcome to america. you're just like every other young woman in this country: total sluts.

so, as you see, i've come up with many reasons to dislike you. yet i listen. and this summer i have gotten addicted to songs like "damaged" and now "bad girl." speaking of which, it was so nice of you little kids to ask missy elliot to sing with you. who would've thought an old grandma could be a star somewhere other than the church choir? i bet it's the gastric bypass. that's why diddy asked missy to sing wichoo sluts. and that's nice. i like that about you/diddy. god, i want gastric bypass soon... anyway....

so i'll continue listening to your music and walking around my apartment singing, "DO -- DO YOU" and not finishing it (only to hear A in another room singing, "got a first aid KIT" if i'm lucky). and i'll watch aubrey's silly interviews and cleavage, which seems to have a publicist of its own.

but i will never be a groupie the way i am with kelly clarkson. and i promise that i will never swoon when i see you at a bra signing at victoria's secret PINK! rather, i will do my best to wonkily look you in the eyes and ask, in true vapid whore paris hilton fashion, "what are you, person? you remind me of something...?"

love,

mattity kane


p.s. aubrey: please tell jesse mccartney i frickin' luv him! thanks!



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