Valentine's Day 2: Electric Boogaloo
Since I am lucky enough to be single this Valentine’s Day, I’ve been planning for how I will spend my day. Pretty much no one I know is single, so I won’t have to worry about regular social obligations. And as I am blissfully unattached, I won’t have to worry about some chocolate and rose crazed harlot trying to have her lustful way with me again and again all night long until the sheer repetition of it causes me to pine for the fresh originality of the tenth season of M*A*S*H. Instead, I’m trying to come up with romantic yet productive activities for one to keep me busy while the rest of the world is engrossed in gazing lovingly into each others eyes. Thankfully, another flash of inspiration struck today. While all my friends and neighbors are out enjoying fancy dinners, carriage rides, or whatever it is that people in love are supposed to do to avoid conversation, I’ll put on my fanciest suit, light a few candles, then break into their homes and steal their stereos. The proceeds should be more than enough to buy a Valentine’s Day hooker.
What can I say? I’m a hopeless romantic.
-TC
Valentine's Day
Valentine’s Day is this weekend, and like most single people, I’m trying to come up with plans for how to make the most productive use of my time while everyone else is stuck sitting through tediously romantic dinners, exhausting romantic walks, and unnecessarily passionate love making. As I’m not unfortunate enough to have my life fettered with such humdrum obligations, I’m going to have the quintessential single man’s Valentine’s Day. I’ll be going out in search of the most romantic restaurant filled with the most happy young couples, and I will be setting it on fire. It’s a sparse itinerary, but I think it will be a rewarding one all the same.
-TC
Maple Candy
My first job out of college was in a maple candy factory, perhaps the most successful application of a liberal arts degree to date. Now, as a good Vermonter, I am a huge proponent of all things maple. Maple syrup, maple candy, gay marriage licenses notarized with a maple stamp, you name it. I lived and died by the code of maple. That is, until I got the factory job and ate maple candy non-stop for the better part of a year. My shameless gluttony coupled with coming home every day in maple soaked pants (not to mention working with a drug dealer who regularly threatened to stab me) was enough to make the very thought of maple candy absolutely revolting to me.
When I went home for Christmas, I bought a maple leaf from my old factor as a little present for someone, but it never got delivered. So I’ve been looking at this maple leaf on my dresser for a few weeks and wondering, is four years enough time that I can finally put the past behind me and stomach the idea of maple candy again? Well, today my sweet tooth got the better of me and I decided to give it a shot. The verdict? The sickening sweetness of the candy was only offset by the bitter memory of folding thousands of these boxes as I opened it.
Maybe in another four years…
-TC
State of the Union
I was a bit disappointed with yesterday’s State of the Union Address. I mean, really, it’s just a giant iPod touch. What were you thinking, Obama?
-TC
Avatar
I finally broke down and saw Avatar last night. I’ll only say two things about this movie. First…unobtainium? Really? This must have been a total Poochie moment in the writers room, if ever I saw one.
Second, at exactly what point in the course of human evolution do we start feeling the need to equip our giant, walking battle robots with hunting knives? “Sure they have machine guns and missiles, but you gotta give ‘em a blade, ‘casue you never know when they’ll find themselves in the midst of a robot whittling contest.”
-TC
An Important Lesson
My dad’s toilet hasn’t worked properly for a couple years now. He has neither the money nor the skill to have it fixed, so he’s just sort of let it be, filling up the tank by hand with jugs of water whenever he needs to use it. So I decided that as part of his Christmas present this year, I would buy whatever parts need to be replaced and fix it for him. I like to think I learned a valuable life lesson from this experience. If someone says “I’d like you to fix my toilet, please,” you say no. And if they say, “I’d really just as soon you didn’t fix my toilet,” you don’t insist.
On the upside, after a good seven hours of effort, it does in fact work.
-TC
Awkward
My roommate had a birthday party last night, and invited me to come along. While I quite like my roommate, I tend to be a bit introverted, so we don’t hang out or bond too terribly much. As such, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to go out, meet some new people, and spend some quality time with the person I spend so much time silently cohabiting with. Unfortunately, the party was going to be held in a strip club, which, as a general rule, is exactly the sort of place tend to avoid. But luckily the stripping party was going out for food and drinks beforehand, so I decided to at least go along and show support by playing my part in ensuring that the birthday girl found herself more or less completely trashed by the end of the evening.
However, after some delightful conversations with new people, not to mention more than a few drinks, the possibility of going to a strip club didn’t seem like anywhere near as bad an idea as usual. My spirit of adventurousness quickly took over, and upon my roommate producing passes for free entry, it was quickly joined by my spirit of cheapness. As a general life policy, I like to think that I’ll try almost anything once. If you get me drunk first and tell me it’s free, the “almost” tends to become roughly as flexible as my good judgment. And so it was that I found myself venturing out to a strip club last night.
The experience was very similar to the one I expected, save the fact that I thought the dancers would be a bit more energetic and the chairs would be a bit more comfortable. As for the dancers, I was surprised how “stripping” seemed less an act of burlesque and more one of awkwardly swaying at a high school dance. At one point, one of my new friends of the evening turned to me and asked, “So, what do you think she’s going for with that dance?” I paused thoughtfully for a second and replied, “I think she’s going for ‘I’m stoned and I’m looking for my car keys.’” And as for the furnishings, all I can say is that I would have imagined a place that is based solely on making people feel like they’re important could have made at least some effort to make them feel comfortable at the same time. After all, what self respecting guy with wads of cash and an abundance of sexual magnetism would blow his money on awkwardly shaped velvet chairs with stains and no lumbar support?
Now, when I walk into a room where there aren’t any ladies taking their clothes off for money, typically there will be more than enough awkward to go around. So you can just imagine what walking into a room and finding a naked woman perched precariously on a pair of oversized high heels that she clearly borrowed from an Amazon at the last second did for the situation. At first it was actually a bit of a relief. After all, it’s been so long since I’ve seen a naked woman that it was nice to know that all the important bits are more or less where I remembered them to be. And really, being surrounded by scantily clad strangers, while not an experience I’m anxious to repeat, was not as uncomfortable an experience as I might have thought.
The real awkward came when I, as the guy in the group sitting closest to the nearest walkway, kept getting offered lap dances every few minutes. In and of itself, this wasn’t especially objectionable, as you can pretty much apply the basic rules of telling a waitress that you don’t want a refill on your Pepsi to informing a woman in a corset that you’d rather she didn’t waggle her bottom at you. But what I hadn’t accounted for was how physical strippers are in their flirtatious advances. After we’d been sitting for maybe twenty minutes, I was in mid conversation with the man next to me when all of a sudden a strange hand started running up my inner thigh. I abruptly whipped my head around to give her my best deer in the headlights look (which, with eyes like mine, is pretty good), and she offered me a dance. Now, as this was the most physical contact I’ve had with a woman in about two years, I found myself a bit flustered and surprisingly unable to verbally articulate complex thoughts like “No, thank you,” so I had to make due with hand gestures that I felt conveyed my sentiments. Unfortunately, it would seem that in Russian these gestures translate as “Please stare at me blankly as you continue to stroke my inner thigh.” No wonder the Soviet Union collapsed.
As I said, I’ll try almost anything once. But as is often the case, going to a strip club is an experience where once is enough.
-TC
Laughter
This year has been a tough one for everyone, and so it’s no surprise that this Christmas will have to be a lean one. That’s why I’ve decided to give all my friends and family the most precious gift of all: the gift of a child’s laughter. Unfortunately, when I run up to a child in the streets and shake my fists wildly while screaming “laugh,” I seem to get more crying than anything else. But I’m not giving up hope. Because at the end of the day, the people I care about are worth it.
-TC
Cab Driver
It’s rare that I find myself in a cab, but this weekend I accompanied some friends from Manhattan to Brooklyn in one of the city’s many fine taxis. While we were dodging traffic at what might have seemed like excessive speed in less sophisticated parts of the world, one of said friends decided to strike up a conversation with the driver, and it wasn’t long before he opened right up and started chatting away like there was no tomorrow. As soon as I mentioned that I was from Vermont, he started to describe in unexpectedly graphic detail how he used to have sex with this girl in Bennington, which segued nicely into a thorough account of every woman he had ever slept with and, occasionally, married. In the course of his life story, it dawned on me that my cab driver has impregnated more women than I have seen naked. I can’t begin to count the number of levels on which I was unhappy about this.
-TC
Spam
It would seem that today, someone pretending to be me accessed my e-mail account and sent out this mass message to everyone I’ve ever contacted inviting them to buy digital cameras from some website. My friends knew it wasn’t me, though. This isn’t due to the fact that I was inexplicably selling things or had the grammar of a bad Chinese robot, but because I suspiciously mentioned that I was experiencing “happiness.” My friends know me so well.
-TC
Hair Metal
I see people performing for money in the subway all the time. But today I saw my first one man hair metal band. And he totally rocked my world. Not enough that I gave him money, of course, just enough that I decidedly avoiding giving him any overtly dirty looks as I passed by. I’m too kind, I know.
-TC
Writing
I’ve been writing a lot lately. As is always the case when I’ve been productive for a while, I felt like doing some mindless busy work to make it feel like I was accomplishing something while actually doing little more than killing time between now and the grave. In that spirit, I decided to print out the latest copies of all the scripts I’ve started in the last few years and organize them together in a binder.
Once I had done so, the first thing I realized was that this binder is now heavy enough that I could easily beat someone to death with it. The second thing I realized was that doing so would probably be the most productive thing that is likely to happen with this material.
-TC
Transformers
Alright, I’ll admit that there’s a ten year old boy inside me, and no matter how much I may fight it, I still have an overwhelming impulse to see movies based on things from my childhood, like super hero films and the like. But at least I’ve reached the point where I can usually wait until they’ve come out on DVD so I can experience my shame in private. And I knew when I rented Transformers 2 from Netflix that I was making a terrible life choice, but I had no idea just how bad an idea this was. All I can say is that I’m less than 15 minutes in and there has already been a flatulent robot.
Michael Bay, if you’re reading, I’m embarrassed for both of us.
-TC
Highs and Lows
I came home to New England for the weekend, and I thought I would give a quick rundown on the highs and lows of my day here in small town USA. On the high side, within hours of waking up this morning I had a stranger tell me I was handsome, then had an attractive young woman give me a free cookie in exchange for flashing my winning smile. (I’d like to gloat about how dreamy this sort of thing might suggest me to be, but sadly I don’t think that the title of Most Attractive Man in Walpole, New Hampshire is as difficult to attain as one might imagine.)
And on the low side, I went into an empty house and saw my first free-standing urinal in a residential home. Not, I should point out, in a bathroom. Just sitting there off the kitchen. Western Civilization at it’s finest.
-TC
Master Race
Today I saw a man walking down the street with a cat sitting on his head, and a very nice homeless looked at me and shouted, “You ain’t no master race, bitch.” Or, as we say in New York, it’s Monday.
-TC
Yelps
Today I was reading The New York Times, and there was a story about a supreme court case where a man is accused of distributing images of animal cruelty for including scenes of a dogfight in a documentary. As part of his defense, his lawyers counted “at most, 25 seconds containing yelps.” Some go to law school for the money, others to fight for social justice. I wonder if these people went in hoping they’d get the chance to sit with a stopwatch so they could stand before the supreme court seriously arguing over exactly how many dog yelps constitute animal cruelty from a legal standpoint. Still, better than being the bankruptcy attorney advertising on the subway.
-TC
Steve Jobs
Being a massive dork, I spent part of the day reading a live blog covering Apple’s iPod announcement, once again helmed by Steve Jobs. I’m glad to see that Liver 2.0 seems to have launched without incident.
-TC
Tompkins Square Park
I like to keep people up to date on teh strangest things I’ve seen lately. Today I was hanging around Tompkins Square Park with some friends, and of course, being in a public park in New York, we were surrounded by vagrants. One such gentleman was being a bit raucous, shouting things occasionally and hitting the ground with a big stick. But, whatever, that’s not atypical New York behavior, so I paid him no mind. After a while, he got up, whipped out his junk as he was walking by, and wandered over to a corner, where he proceeded to urinate on a box. Again, whatever. I mean, you’ve got to urinate on something, right? But the bit that I found especially unsettling was that when he was finished, he put his hands in said urine and rubbed it all over his face. Then went back to hitting the ground with a stick as though nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred.
My philospy is that if I have to see something, other people need to visualize it. It’s only fair.
-TC
Crazy
I had to work today, and as I was leaving my office, a crazy man walked up to me and said “basketball star, rent a car, state to state,” then walked away. I then had another of those moments when I realized that this was probably the most social interaction I would have all day.
On the upside, when I was on the subway home, I thought of a witty comeback to something someone said to me seven years ago. So the day wasn’t a complete waste.
-TC