Scalito

Introducing Samuel A. Alito, Jr., nicknamed "Scalito" for his ideological similarities to Scalia. I don't know by whom. His fraternity buddies?

Ew.

At least no boogying babies this time.



Kind of boring without them, actually.

But still... Republicans. Ew.

The Del Gershmonster Strikes!

My dear friend K. Del Gershmonster and friends went out the other night. To Saddle Ranch! Mechanical bull-rides! Urban cowboy! Yay! K., our chic friend D., the wired-differently-from-the-rest-of-us P., and P.'s friend the professional wrestler. A party waiting to happen, that foursome.

At the end of the night, a waiter comes up to K.

"Hi... um... yeah, one of our regulars? Over there? It's his birthday. And, um... he's in love with you?"

So after some cajoling and guilting and pleading looks K. goes and talks to this fat, middle-aged Yeshiva type who apparently drives a yellow Lamborighini. After several awkward overtures, K. puts him out of his misery and gives him her number ("It was his birthday."). Ten minutes later, as P. begins puking in the car, she has a voicemail.

"Hi... I know this seems forward... but you're one of the most incredible women I've ever met. If you're not doing anything... I mean, I'm sure you are, but if you're not, I would love to take you out tomorrow, to the Playboy Mansion... they're having a Halloween party... please, give me a call..."

This would only ever happen to K. Alas, she did not go, and cannot therefore report on the veracity of any claims regarding said Mansion or the accuracy of E!'s popular Playboy Mansion program, The Girls Next Door, featuring Hef's Live-In Hos. Is Kira actually that retarded? Are Holly's boobs made of cement, or do they just look that way? We'll never know.


Saddle Ranch? Who the fuck's a regular at Saddle Ranch?

The Mind Melts

I'm not into music. It's somewhat shameful, but true. I love the musicals of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jason Robert Brown; I love Bjork, Gwen Stefani, The Stones, The Beastie Boys, and Ben Folds Five; I really love the choral works of Benjamin Britten and everything by Grieg; I kind of love going to see opener indie bands with lead singers who wear pantyhose over their faces, but other than that--meh. Whatever. I work best in silence.

And then I discovered Nellie McKay.

Seriously, I'm so excited about this that John Cleese was hanging out at my coffee shop today and I don't even want to write about it. Although it was pretty funny when the barista's groupies ignored him and then screamed, "BYE JOHN CLEESE!" when he left, and then started making out with his muffin. "Look, John Cleese's bite marks! I'm kissing King Arthur!"

But... yeah. Back to Nellie McKay.

Where have I been? Her album, the charmingly titled Get Away From Me features songs like "Clonie." Clonie! She's talking to her clone! Who's the apple of her eye?

Clonie!

And there's more! The equally fucked up "Sari" is rattled off in the manner of Eminem, were he to hang out with Ani DiFranco and/or Doris Day. And in "Ding-Dong" she becomes addicted to gin because her cat dies and then they drag her off to like the asylum or something, I'm not really sure actually, but it's kind of 40s-style and damn catchy.

And who gets a double album deal for their relatively unmarketable debut collection when they're 19? Although she's probably 20 by now. The album came out a while ago (K.'s dad, who's in his sixties, has known of her for a while). Where have I been?

Where have you been? Go download her album! Now! And then send her a thank-you check for melting your brain.

Joooooooooan

Dennis came over yesterday and we played with his new eleventy billion dollar camera.



Awwww! Kitty! (Dennis calls her Joan).

We then took frolicky pictures by the ocean walk.



I FEEL it! In the EYES! FIERCE! (Everything I know about picture posing I learned from America's Next Top Model).

Um... Dennis and I have a lot of free time.


He also takes great party pictures. Except for maybe when he very furtively follows me down the hall when I am leaving a particular party to take shots like this:



where I look all sketchy but am really just pressing the elevator button, and then posts them on ImageStation with suggestive, misleading captions about why and when I am leaving, and with whom, Dennis.

But then I laugh, and all is well.

The Englilsh Majors

Okay, so I put up with my fair share of English major jokes in college. All the comments about the Trinity College of Arts and Crafts, the constant notings of our department's rampant grade inflation, and general reminders that I had chosen to study a field spectacular in its nonrelevance to the working world. I took this abuse smugly, because, after all, English majors are a, if not rare, special breed of person, immune to things like reality. We are the savants, man. Get with it.

Yeah so when the English alumni e-mail list, used three times a year for the newsletter, started getting random spam, my brilliant compatriots replied-to-all the following (Best Of below):

Best Pomposity
I am receiving returned emails purporting to have come from you. Please
stop using my address as your return address.

Best Free Verse
i have no clue how i got on this list/ it must be a virus
thanks

Best Pithy Nonsense
Get in touch with Duke & leave me out of your inane loop on this.
Other than a slip of paper with an "BA" on it, I have no affiliation
with Duke & I certainly have no interest in leaving your return
addresses on any of my correspondence.

Best Empty Threat
If I get any more e-mails from anyone associated with Duke I will pursue all of you legally. I have no idea who you are.


Strongbad writes more coherently than this. A bunch of Yellow Darts, all of them.

+5! Nickname still cool!



Also, the long-neglected Weekend Report:

1. Learned: I have no game.
2. Obtained: sweet new hat that makes me look like a yeti.

And I wonder about #1.

Gwennie Gwen Gwen

I'm going Gwen Stefani's show at the Hollywood Bowl tonight; it will be my fourth time seeing her live since I first developed my Gwen girlcrush at age 14. True love, people: it doesn't die. I was choosing my outfit to wear to the concert and this went through my head:

"Oooh! I could wear my plaid pants! With a white shirt!"

I then realized this is exactly what I wore the first time I saw No Doubt.

In eighth grade.

Celebrity Stretching

David Duchovny was in my yoga class this morning. Agent Fox Mulder, searching for his flexible inner Zen. The truth is out there, Fox. Now shiva'asana! Now!

I Caved

You know what? I'm sick of it. I'm done. For the last year, I've been hooking my thumbs in my belt loops every time I might have to bend over, premptively hiking up my jeans, and then sneaking a look behind me as I reach for my dropped pencil. Sometimes I pull up my underwear, too, because as much as you don't need to see my undies, you really don't need to see my butt cleavage.

It's the low-rise jeans.

I'm sorry, I'm sick of them. They've gone from attractively hip-slung to leg warmers that connect on top. They're all comfortably loose in the legs and then come together in a cinch to keep them from falling down, curving inward right around that squishy roll of upper hip, turning it into two rolls, and making even the most toned of abdominals look like a muffin top.

Not to mention not particularly-toned-abdominals.

So you know what? Something had to be done. And I did it.

I bought high-waisted jeans today.

And I am wearing them.

With pride.

Feel Dirty, Not In Good Way

K. and I were supposed to hike this morning, but I left my phone in the car and missed her call.

Turns out she had invited a friend along. That friend also invited a friend, who in turn invited another friend. Friendship, it seems, is everywhere. K. discovered that this friend thrice-removed is back with her former boyfriend. Who I used to date. It didn't end well. It kind of ended because of her.

K. was very sweet and said she wasn't very toned, which means "tall and thin without having to work out, but you're my best friend and she's not." Glad I slept in. I feel fat. Ew. Ew.

I 'Depend' On You

The New York Times. The Gray Lady. All the news that's fit to print. Thanks to my parents' print subscription, I can bypass that TimesSelect shit and read it all online for free. And I do.

This is great, because then I know (or feel like I know) everything: the plight of Pakistani earthquake survivors, Maureen Dowd's nicknames for the douchier members of the government, all about Carol Channing's new cabaret, and let's not forget the really important stuff, like toilet training. Yes. In the last four days, there have been three articles on not even general, but infant-specific toilet training. Each article points the reader to www.diaperfreebaby.org, and extols DFB's message of... um... diaper-free babies...

In today's article, because apparently this is the kind of thing that breaks throughout the week:

Parents in at least 75 countries, including India, Kenya and Greenland, embrace the practice, with Chinese babies often wearing pants with split bottoms for easy squatting (available for $1 in Chinatown, according to savvy mothers in New York).

Split knickers? How early eighteenth-century France. Naughty!

But we must address the naysayers:

Another mother in Toys "R" Us, who offered her opinion but wanted to remain anonymous, was aghast at the notion. "Have you read Freud?" she asked, worrying about the method's long-term effects. "I imagine it's going to come out in sexual ways."

Um, right. This is totally the face of latent perversion:



Also: Toys "R" Us? This is your scientific polling ground? The store has a ferris wheel in the middle. Is Geoffrey the Giraffe suddenly a Ph.D in early and largely disproved psychological theory?

And this is interesting and all, but I'm 22. Ok, 24, but whatever dudes, just get off DFB's payroll, give me some Sunday Styles, and let's all get on with our lives.

I have to pee.

The Shitshow

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Nooooooo!!!

Nick and Jessica deny divorce rumors.

Whatever, when it does actually happen, I'll just link to the post below.

Again.

Yessssss!!!

You heard it here first, kids. Or you heard it from... somewhere else. Actually, you heard it here a few months ago.

What's happening to celebrity couples? Brad and Jen... Nick and Jessica... Paris and Man Paris... next you know, there'll be a Note From Beyond that Carrie left Big for some ballet dancer.

Anyway, point to Janice Min. Big scoop, right? I can hear the enraged thump-thump-thump of advance US Weeklys hitting Bonnie Fuller's assistant at Star from all the way out here.

On Signs And Signings With The Autograph Woman

My dear friend Colby called yesterday, offering birthday congratulations: 24 rounds, and I had bested death once again. I met Colby at writing camp when I was 17. Oh, those halcyon days of writing camp. We'd sit around and discuss comma splices and King Lear and I'd think to myself, "College is going to be just like this!"

Anyway, before he even got out the second word of wishes, I had this flash of connection.

Zadie Smith. I was going to a Zadie Smith reading that night!

Colby had gone to one years ago, and, in a slightly overenthusiastic but ultimately effective ploy to impress this Zadie fangirl from Austin, made and displayed a large sign saying "ZADIE, WILL YOU MARRY ME?" Zadie declined but signed the sign, allowing Colby and the Austin girl to live happily for quite some time.

Later on, I found a piece Ms. Smith wrote about that self-same book tour. Near the beginning:

In a Barnes and Noble in Union Square, I sign books for a really long time. In the queue is one young man holding a giant sign that reads: Zadie Will You Marry Me with no commas or discernable punctuation. I tell him no – he is on the short side, and only seventeen years old, and his hair is left too long at the ears – also, I have in mind a man who knows what a question mark is. He steps aside. I feel relief – and yet there will come a time when that boy seems, in retrospect, to be the great highlight of this particular queue. For in his wake come a seemingly endless line of sweet, spiky-haired, insistent women who want to give me presents. They give me earrings made out of amber, Annie DiFranco CD’s, and plot suggestions. They wear khaki shorts and t-shirts representing either the city they came from, or a cartoon cat.

Yeah, she's a little bitchy, right? But so good. Just look how she... wait! I know that guy! Ahhhhh! Colby had been immortalized by certainly the best writer of our generation, albeit incorrectly (he is quite tall; he was 19; he and proper punctuation are on intimate terms. The hair thing might have been on).

Colby is the inimitable sort who will hold signs and ask loud, incredibly intelligent, funny questions, and get described in peripheral essays by high-profile writers, so it came as no surprise. One time he showed a photo of me reading Ulysses in a bikini (because Colby would have such things) to Dave Eggers, who signed it in crayon:

HI MEGHAN. NICE BEACH. DE

He and Colby might have things in common.

I, however, am not that sort. I attend readings and sit in the back, and get very excited if the writer drops something and I pick it up for them; their "Thank you" is the stuff of my dreams. I am there to osmose their genius and bear witness. It isn't a bad way to be, but it's quiet.

Maybe it's reaching 24 (I am OLD!), but last night I let that go, slowly. The reading was at 826, a non-profit writing center at which I volunteer. I was in the hall when she came out, and I followed her down, osmosing: noting her shoes, her skin, her impossible cheekbones. Zadie Smith is a writer even Dennis could love.


Very pretty, no? I took my seat, a plum one near the front, and listened. The audience asked questions. Several made me wince. I winced so hard at one that my hair fell in my face, and as I brushed it out she called on me. My surprise must have come through, because she smiled in apology.

"I'm sorry," and then, addressing the room, "she was just touching her hair."

Have you ever felt that you were under a spotlight, that it had suddenly flicked on and everyone on Earth was now watching, waiting for you to perform? Oddly, this was my prompt: I asked a question. When she sat to sign books, I was first in line, gave her my pen ("Don't, you'll never see it again." "It's okay--I steal them from work.")

I told her about my friend who had held up the sign and her eyes widened in recognition.

"I wrote about him!"

And then we talked for a bit. I gave her two books to sign, a brand-new (unread) copy of On Beauty and a dog-eared, marked-up, sun-bleached White Teeth.

"Meghan, what is this?" she asked. I replied that it was well-read. "It looks as though it were dipped in coffee." Ms. Smith and I might have differing opinions on the way to treat books. But we talked a bit more. We had a little conversation. I didn't even mention that it was my birthday. It may as well have been May 5th. Do you understand what was happening here? Zadie Smith was smiling at me! She is not notorious for indulging strangers; I think she was genuinely amused--piqued, even--by my anecdotes! I do not pretend that we are now friends, or that she'll remember me as she does Colby, but I felt very good.



(the beatific, glowing writer addresses her parish)


She signed my book:

To Meghan

hair-twister,
friend of Colby,


Zadie Smith xo