Early Adoption Not Always Beneficial

I'm at my parent's house in NJ (sometimes you just need a little hot tub/pet/watch HBO with Mom time) with no cell phone, so I used the land line to call Dan.  It took me three tries.  I never, ever dial a phone anymore.  Just another skill gone to atrophy.  Thanks, technology.

Does anyone else do this, or am I just special?

Harlem Shakes

My stupid fucking back is still hurting a lot, and that plus the constant loopy feeling I get from the drugs are making me really crabby.  Plus Duke got resoundly knocked out of the tournament last night, and the new assistant in our office is being a dick about it.  I don't understand the prevailing view that it's totally ok to say "Oh, you went to Duke?  Ugh, I'm sorry," but if I say that about UNC, or any other school, really, I look like an asshole.  Yeah, assistant.  Duke was just terrible.  Can you imagine having to hang out with a bunch of smart people on the most beautiful campus in the country with year-round gorgeous weather?  Yeah, it was torture.

My five-year reunion is less than a month away, incidentally.  I'm getting really, really excited for it.  Beer trucks... the lemur center... Cosmic... yesssssss.

Anyway, what I meant to blog about was the Harlem Shakes, a band we saw last night.  Mainly so I could make a joke like, "... the Harlem Shakes-- the band, not a colloquial term for black Parkinson's patients."  Ugh, I know, it's bad on several levels.  But they were pretty good.  Also, you can take a lesson from the whole situation: we were at the show because a friend of ours was recently laid off from his fancy finance job, and instead of wallowing in fruitless searching for a different fancy finance job, took it as an opportunity to get into the music business and is now their tour manager or something equivalent.  So, good for seeing the silver lining.  ALSO, even though I was wiped because the meds keep me wiped all the time and my back was killing me, I enjoyed going to a live show.  Lesson: if choices are to feel shitty at home or feel shitty while doing something fun, choose latter.  Yes.  Good.

Bleeeeeeeeeeeh

My my my.  I'm still taking Flexeril and meandering through my workdays, staring glassy-eyed at whoever comes my way.  I asked my boss if she still needed a binder clip, because I had just found my stash of them, but I believe I asked her in gibberish.  Rather than fail twice, I just held the binder clips aloft.  Also my hands and feet feel weird.  Why is it so cold in here?  And why is my face so hot?

Dan and I went out to a "fancy dinner" last night, to The John Dory.  We got some really fucking awesome thing that was masquerading as shrimp and grits, crab bruschetta, and the most perfect John Dory (which is a fish, people, not a Canadian sex act) that may be eaten by man.  

Also, we sat next to Sean Penn, so that was exciting.

Very Active Weekend

If I don't set goals for myself on the Friday of every weekend, I Saturday through Sunday lying on the couch. This weekend's list was fairly simple:

- eat Indian food
- do laundry
- dye hair
- finish taxes
- write five pages (I'm trying to get write more)
- straighten up room
- see I Love You, Man and/or Duplicity

Pretty easy list, right? No issues finishing that bad boy.

I completed #1. Friday night, Dan and I gorged ourselves at Taj Mahal and then rented Manhattan, which we both found pretty boring. Maybe you need to be older to appreciate vintage Woody Allen? Or if you aren't old, you should at least be Jewish? Any young person I know who likes this movie is a nonpracticing Jew, I just realized. So that was Friday. I couldn't find my W-2, so there go the taxes.

I should mention that my back's been hurting all week. Nothing major, but a consistent, annoying pain, like I strained a muscle or something. I thought maybe I slept on it weird.
Anyway, I woke up on Saturday with that same pain, and after an omelet (I learned to make omelets!), a light jog, and a few basic errands, I started to feel like my torso was being slowly ripped from the rest of my body and spent the rest of the day on the couch on muscle relaxants. It was excruciating. And that's pretty much what I've been doing since. Mom says I have a spasm. Poor Dan did the laundry by himself. I kind of want to take Monday off work, but we're so busy right now that I feel like I should tough it out, even if I float into work on my bevy of painkillers. If you're watching our network in a few months are like, "what the what were they on when they put this on the air," well... the answer is Flexeril. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

When You're A Jet, You're A Jet All The Way

I'm so thrilled that West Side Story is back on Broadway.  I directed a production of West Side in college, in the spring of my senior year.  I'm particularly excited about this production, because although WSS is by far the best American musical, it has several massive problems, all apparently fixed:

1. The book.  The script and many of the lyrics for this show are terrible ("cos every Puerto Rickan... is a lousy chic-ken!"  Seriously).  West Side is closer to an awesome musical ballet than a traditional musical-- without the dance and music it's kind of a mess.  When we did it in college, I cast two horrible actors with excellent opera training as Tony and Maria.  Looking back, that isn't something I'd change.  Tony and Maria are two of the most boring characters to ever appear on stage.  But apparently, in the new production a lot of the libretto is updated, and the Sharks speak to each other in Spanish.  Dios mio!

2. The leads.  As I stated, Tony and Maria are little more than bell-voiced teens with terrible dialogue, but apparently in the new production, they're great!  That's awesome.

3. The dream ballet.  Ha, just kidding.  They've kept the dream ballet.  

This is a long, pointless ballet number in which Maria and Tony imagine their ideal life in the country or something.  We never considered doing it, except for in an April Fool's email I sent to the cast a week before opening, telling them I thought we should put it back in, and that with a couple of all-nighters and an extra build day we could totally do it.  I was almost lynched.

4.  "I Feel Pretty."  I hated working on this number, because it included all of the would-be Marias who were super pissed at me for casting them in minor roles.  It's also pretty stupid.  In the revival, though, it's in Spanish and apparently adorable.  Don't they look cute?  And I bet the dancers in this show are just happy to be there, and don't put up passive aggressive away messages whenever they have to rehearse.

5.  "Tonight"!  This number is awesome.  I fucking love it.  It's the basis for "One Day More" in Les Miz, which in turn inspired "La Resistance" in the South Park movie!  The whole cast is stomping around their corners of the stage, singing about the upcoming rumble/ sexytime/ romancetime, pointing at each other even though they're supposed to be in different parts of town.  Doesn't it look cool?

I need to get tickets!  Which are apparently selling like gang warfare in the late 1950s.

Dennis Is Famous!

I think that appearing in the background on American Idol is about the same as starring in a show on NBC at this point.

Um, Also

Marty says Happy St. Patrick's Day.

(My mom sent me this picture).

(But... I'm the one who made the hat.  Ugh, I have problems).

Passing out and swearing on St. Patrick's Day? Is nothing sacred? --Jack Donaghy

St. Patrick's Day should be everyone's first or second favorite holiday. Even if you don't drink, there is one aspect everyone can cherish: the outfits. Irish-Americans, never known for their fashion sense anyway, wear the most ridiculous, hideous outfits on St. Patrick's Day, and don't really consider it "dressing up." At least, not in the sense that St. Patrick Day get-up is a costume. It isn't. No one's like, "what am I going to do for St. Paddy's? I should go shopping." No. On the morning of March 17th, an Irish-American lass like myself awakes, stretches, and goes through her closet, picking out every piece of apparel with a hint of green, and just piles them on to her body. It is completely natural in these circumstances to wear two pairs of pants, or scrunched, 80s-style layers of socks in various herbaceous tones. One might keep something around that would otherwise go to the Goodwill for St. Paddy's purposes (I made room for a lime-green spangled sweater vest in my closetless shoebox of a room for two years for this reason), or have a collection of leprechaun hats that have just been around for a while, but mostly it's a mash-up.

So this morning I went to my closet and discovered a glaring, depressing lack of green clothing. My Goodwill purges have caught up with me. I turned a Christmas shirt inside out and stuck on my green witch-looking jelly shoes, hoping that would suffice, went outside, and saw NO ONE wearing green. Don't you hate that moment of panic, when you think for a moment that Halloween's actually tomorrow? I had them all the time in high school, during our Spirit Weeks. There's nothing like waiting for the bus in a full Barbie costume, praying that it isn't actually Decade Day (I believe on ACTUAL Decade Day, my costume was so ridiculous that my mom just drove me to school. Ah, single-gender education). But seriously, I went outside, and everyone was wearing brown, except for a few people wearing black. Went into the subway... same thing. ON the subway... nothing. I hate Williamsburg at times like these. The white people are just so multicultural and into Latin America. At times like these (and... let's be honest, only at times like these) I wish I lived in Hoboken. I SAID IT. IT'S TRUE. Whatever, it's oppressively yuppie, AT LEAST THEY DRESS UP FOR ST. PATRICK'S DAY.

At 8th Ave., I finally saw someone wearing green legwarmers. Crisis averted.

Now let's get some Guinness!

Awwwwww

If I were married to the newly sworn-in President, this would be my favorite picture from the evening:

Echo in the Buffyverse

Buffy Season Three is on Hulu now.  I'm already dreading getting to the end of it, and eventually resorting to Dollhouse, the essence of a follow-up mediocre show.  Scariest part of watching old Buffys?  When they refer to "Slayerfest '98."  NINETY-EIGHT.  Ugh.  Has any action comedy come close to Buffy in the ensuing decade (I know the show ended in the aughts, but I don't really count it after the jump to UPN).  Dollhouse is particularly upsetting because the idea is so cool and the execution so thoroughly botched.  I'd link to it on Hulu but I'm afraid you'll watch the pilot, and to be fair, the pilot is much worse than the ensuing eps.  

Are Dollhouse and Buffy indicative of their respective eras?  Buffy, our BtVS heroine, is a complicated character, full of dark corners and sarcastic quips to counter her Sarah-Michelle-Gellar hotness and perky California name.  She knows her destiny and accepts it, however unhappily, and tries to carve out her own path along the way.  The show was entertaining, and on an internal level--despite the ridiculous fantasy world it portrayed--believable.  The characters had inner lives that made sense, and everyone made choices.

This, I think, is the big problem with Dollhouse.  Eliza Dushku, of Faith-from-Buffy fame, who is… not the greatest actress… plays a person who's had her personality wiped and gets new ones imprinted for her Missions of the Week by a nefarious and shady company known as The Dollhouse.  The whole thing is very mysterious, and by "mysterious" I mean "stupid."  Also, uncomfortable, because a bunch of the missions involve Faith boning someone and not remembering it later, like she's on high-tech roofies.

Are we seeing the distinction?  That if you look at popular culture as a reflection of the zeitgist, the nineties supported ass-kicking girls with autonomy and an inner life, while the new millenium prefers its kick-ass ladies to be under someone's thumb, under constant supervision, without a personality to speak of.  Yes, I am using fantasy adventure serials to evaluate all of American culture, get with it.

On the other hand, Dollhouse's ratings are absolutely awful.  So maybe the world prefers free will after all.

Next time on "Meghan Watches A Lot of TV For Her Job and Feels the Need to Share": Kings!

Cramer vs. Cramer

"So, what'd I miss?" I asked Dan when I got home from Costa Rica. I was expecting news on the stimulus bill or Tsvangirai's progress in Zimbabwe. Instead, he said, "Oh, man. Jon Stewart gave CNBC the smackdown." Dan doesn't even watch The Daily Show, so I had a feeling that this would be big.

Turns out, a CNBC squawker had cancelled on TDS, and in response Jon Stewart devoted an entire 8-minute clip to embarrassing moments from CNBC. Jim Cramer took this kind of personally and said bad things about Jon Stewart, and a war of basic cable personalities was launched, with about a million and a half views online.  Oh, lordy.

So Jim went on the show last night, and it was like my old job and my new job went mano a mano.  (One of my page assignments - my best page assignment - was three months on Mad Money). Jim got hosed. I can't believe he went on at all, that CNBC thought it was a good idea (apparently, it came from them), that he wasn't more prepared, and I'm definitely pretty sure that the Mad Money offices are not a fun place this morning. Personally, I found the interview kind of boring and cringeworthy--Jon is awesome and all, but I think he went overboard. Cramer isn't Madoff, and Mad Money isn't Crossfire.

So if you're in a slightly sadistic mood, last night's episode:




Also, why doesn't the president support gay marriage? DUDE. GET WITH THE TIMES.

And Google Voice is going to be a game-changer.

Ross G. Douthat

The Times just announced their newest columnist: Ross G. Douthat, a David Brooks-ian conservative, to replace William Kristol.

They also mentioned, off-handedly, that Ross is 29 years old, and also wondered aloud what exactly I plan to do in the next two years to make my life notable. I hate it when they do that.

But enough of the whining; I know what you're really thinking. Is Ross hot?

He has to be, right?  29?  Times column?  Right-leaning?  This is a straight-up schadenfreude figure. He could very well be the conservative Benjamin Kunkel; I can hear Gawker sharpening its talons. It's important for Ross to be good-looking, because then he becomes both more and less assailable, and certainly more entertaining.  Plus, he can become a naughty fantasy for Planned Parenthood employees.

Sadly...


he is not.




(I'm back from Costa Rica, btw.  Full report this weekend).

Oh Yeah...

Forgot to mention, I'm in Costa Rica. See you next week, my friends.I'll say hi to the monkeys for you.