Prada Princess

Catching up Part 1

2009-04-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

I am nursing a huge hangover after a late dinner with Salad Dancer and the Crow. We have not seen each other since November and Crow sent an email for us to get together.

Since cheap eats are in vogue we decided to meet at Chipotle. Over Burrito Bols and plastic cups filled with pre made margaritas with no salt, we regaled each other with tales of the aftermath of our layoffs.

The Crow is studying for the bar. She actually went to law school but realized she did not want to be a lawyer and went into the media industry.

“It’s funny. Instead of being focused on finding my next job I was more focused on my next door neighbor.”

Salad Dancer asked.

“Why is he hot?”

“No. He’s an asshole. He moved in a couple a months ago and since January he began to play his music way f**king loud and f**king a vast array of vocally charged women. I mean, I know this is the city and noise is par for the course but it got to the point where I was getting nose bleeds from the bass music he was blasting.”

“Wow. That sucks.”

I said after swallowing a bite of burrito bol.

“Yeah. I went through the usual routes of the super , landlord. But no one was willing to help. Finally I put my law school skills to work and did some research on real estate law. I put together a letter for my landlord stating that my right to quite of enjoyment was being violated and that the noise was health hazard and I felt I was being driven out of my apartment and I threatened to go on a rent strike and call the cops. Honestly it was just a letter cobbled with legal bullshit but it apparently made a big impression because landlord himself came down and yelled at the guy.”

“That’s awesome.” Giggled Salad Dancer.

“It was fucking insanity because he would not back down. It turns out my neighbor is a finance analyst which explains why he is such a douchebag and was acting like it was 2003 and that he was flush with bonus money. I mean the guy kept challenging my landlord and told him to go ahead and call the cops.”

“So what happened” I asked.

The Crow took a dramatic pause as her face turned dead serious.

“There was a rumor that there were a bunch of tenants engaging in the distribution of certain types of pharmaceuticals. Apparently bits and pieces of the conversation were heard and they were under the false impression that douchebag analyst wanted to call the cops on them when he yelled about calling the cops. The super shows up at douchebag’s door with a message that it would be better for his health to lay low and not make waves. And since then I haven’t heard a peep from him. ”

“Whoa.” gulped Salad Dancer.

“Yeah.”

“So why didn’t they talk to you? Why didn’t the Super give you a talk?” I asked.

“Unlike douchebag analyst, I didn’t air out my grievances in public so they don’t know I was the one started this whole thing. Besides the 50 bucks I tip the super doesn’t hurt either.

We both laugh. The Crow gazed thoughtfully.

“It was funny. The first quiet night I began reflecting on that whole experience and I realize that I actually enjoyed the whole process despite the fact that I was doing law. And I began to think about why. Then it dawned onto me. I had a problem and I solved it. That was it. Somebody was being a douchebag and not only did I call him out on it I stopped him from being a douchebag to others. Then it hit me. This is why I went to law school. To stop the assholes from the world from running rampant.”

So the Crow decided to take the bar and is volunteering for a legal non profit that helps the little guy. Ideally she would like to do this fulltime but lawyer jobs are scarce right now but she feels something will turn up.

Long time No read

2009-01-31T19:28:00.001-08:00

Hi everyone. I know it has been awhile but it has rather crazy in my life. Tonight I Am alone blogging, watching trashy reality tv and thinking of opening up a bottle of Stoli. This has been actually been a really rough year and it has barely begun.

First off, I am not victim of Madoff, in fact no one within my social circle has been touched. As far as I know.

However everyone is hurting and hurting bad.

My father is freaking out because he had to lay half of his staff and is now faced with doing twice as much work. Any of you read that article about billable hours?

Half the time he is on the phone negotiating with clients over fees.

Mom is actually is also working overtime consoling her friends and even people she does not know. There was one friend of a friend who lives in 740 Park. Yes. That 740 Park. The one where you need a $100 million to even walk into the door. She is freaking out because her husband has taken a beating in not just real estate market but also stock and everything else. The lady has no idea what she is going to do.

Am I still the freewheeling trustfund princess of days past? Well yes and no. I still shop but I am seeing a lot of bargains out there. I mean really good s**t is out there. I am not poor folks but I have noticed my portfolio has done a Paris Hilton knee drop.

I feel rather directionless right now. Don't know what to do with my life.
I am not complaining. I have a great life. I just need to do something inspiring.

Dawn of a new day

2008-11-17T22:16:00.000-08:00

I am officially unemployed. Not a big deal. In fact I am surprised that the media company I was working for lasted this long. The firm was basically supported by hedge fund money and well we know how well they are doing these todays.

We were supposed to have closed up shop in August but all of a sudden we this huge short term advertising contract got dropped on our laps. The client was some big wig who needed research on the media landscape in the political world. We really earned our pay on that one.

So last Friday we cleaned out our cubes, said our goodbyes and promised to keep in touch. It was like the last day of camp.

So what now for the Princess? I haven't got a clue, but that is fine by me. I am going to let myself adrift at least until the end of this year. No point in applying for jobs in the media since there are none to be found. I am not going fight against the current since I have the luxury of owning my life preserver. Who am I kidding? I don't have a life preserver, I have an aircraft carrier courtesy of Grandma.

I have the money and freedom do what I want. Yet, here I am wondering what to do next?

Weird. Whenever I had too much time on my hands, I would go out shopping, go clubbing or do something to fill the void. Yet, it is not enough for me. Maybe some Me time is needed. Some introspective moments on my meaning. I'll keep you posted.

Its been a long time

2008-06-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. I haven't blogged in awhile. And to my audience of 3 readers I apologize. There have been alot changes in my life. I am still working for that media research company but right now that whole place is on steady ground. Apparently that whole place was being fund hedge funds involved in the subprime mortgage industry. And well.. you know how that movie ended. The only reason why we are still alive is because of the election. Our boss thinks we have until November before we are shut down. So in the meantime we are cramming in as many billable hours as possible into our work days. The heads of the company are now scrambling for business when the election ends. I can't say who we are working for but I will just say I am an Obama girl.

So I will be blogging on and off but not as much as I want to. I have alot to say but its funny either I am too busy or I do not feel like blogging at all. What is really weird is that I miss the snarkiness. At first I couldn't stand people trashing me. But now I am loning for getting some comment smacking going on.

Anyways, that is my life for now. Later kiddies!

Why Playboy hates you.

2008-03-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

Yes. I am alive. I have been able to post for awhile because of work and just because I haven’t been in the mood. But there has been so much going on. I could go on about Spitzer Patterson and Mcreevy all night. But it is all that everyone is taking about. I will say I am not surprised about the threesome accusation about Dina and her ex husband. I mean you have to be a freak of a woman to be able to make a gay man straight for such a long time. In fact I admire her talents and her sense of adventure for what she was able to pull off for so long.

I think the biggest deal is the Kristin Davis pictures that hit the web. Apparently these were taken several years ago before she hit it big. She says it isn’t her. All I have to say is that just from these two pictures, I have only things to say to this whoever it is. Hit the gym and look in to Brazilian waxing. Also if her ex-boyfriend did do this he is a piece of s**t.

I think the most atrocious pictures I have seen are from this What would Tyler Durden do?

Audriana from the Hills had aspirations to become a glamour model and submitted photos to Playboy.

According to Splash News

Sources say the beauty from a wealthy Orange County family was a natural in front of the camera and loved every second of the shoot at an LA mansion.
They told how she was thrilled with the results and particularly the raunchy schoolgirl pics.
But now the pictures she urged a photographer friend to take when she was 19 could come back to haunt her.
A source told how Audrina had had enough of posing for bikini shots and decided she wanted to be a glamour model.
"She was determined to go ahead with it, even though she was warned to wait and see how her modelling went before doing topless stuff.
"She was always comfortable in front of the camera and wasn't shy or nervous about doing a nude shoot.
But Audrina's hopes of impressing glamour magazine editors were shattered when Playboy showed no interest in her pictures.
The insider said: "Looking at the pictures you'd say they were crazy to turn her down.
"She looks absolutely sensational.

She looks absolutely sensational for internet porn.

I am not a Playboy buff, I am more into Vogue and Glamour girl but from what I know about the magazine industry, a magazine like Playboy is probably very competitive. The editorial staff is probably bombarded with tons of unsolicited submissions. Playboy is a very strong brand and it has proven with playmates like Pamela Anderson that it can be a spring board to fame and fortune. Hugh Hefner has been at this so long that I bet all he has to do is glance at picture of a naked girl and he will know whether she has the playboy look or not.

Audrina does not have that look and I will explain why.

Here is the first picture BTW this NSFW

As you can see Audrina is laid out topless reclining on the stairs with her plaid pink mirco mini ala naughty schoogirl.

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the words this pictures saying is What the f**K”?

I mean seriously there is no context to this photos. All it is her topless and reclining in a hoochie pose on a set of stairs. As if the stairs is the hugest turn on in the world which it isn't. Her outfit and overall look say naughty punk schoolgirl who wants to get it on. But the wooden stairs and the background say suburban house in Orange County. It just doesn’t work. It would be more appropriate if she was in a punk rock club or on a stripper pole. The only way this picture works right is if there were three guys about to tag team her.

The second photo is another train wreck. NSFW.

This time she is standing up in the classic hands around her head, sticking out her chest pose with her “You want my body” facial expression. What I see here is that she has making of an endomorphic body. Does her car have a flat because she has plentyof spare tires. DO SOME CRUNCHES GIRL AND CUT OUT THE COCA PUFFS! She really needs to hit the gym and get rid of the baby fat.

This photo is just full of clichés.NSFW

Eyes closed, wearing an orange cowboy hat, with one arm up in a Cleopatra pose the other arm covering her cootchie. Standing in a hot tub. This is probably one of the most awkward poses I have ever seen. This is a blatant misuse of the environment. What Audrina should have done was get rid of the cowboy hat and use the hot tub. Let the soap cover her up her nether regions while letting the naughty bits poke out. The hand on the crotch looks completely amateurish. Also get rid of the candle stick holders. It feels like she is about to serve a 12 course meal naked.

Now this just ridiculous. NSFW

From the way the water from the pool is showing her legs it looks like she is squatting down on the verge of laying a big steaming pile. The expression on her face is not very glamorous or sexy. In fact she looks annoyed. I remember in a film class I took in college that one of the most important visual effects is the face. That is one of the core things that the audience can relate to. The reason why certain actors are successful is that they are able to communicate with their faces to the audience. My guess is that one of the things Hef looks for in a Playmate is a woman who is sincerely happy to show her naked body to the world. His readers are to able to feel that joy from that playmate. Remember, boys have feelings too. They don’t want to feel bad or depressed looking at naked girls. Also the lighting is also not very flattering since she looks quite pasty.

Another cliche. NSFW

Once again she uses the hands behind the head pose but it doesn’t work. It is a very unflattering shot of her left boob and makes it look like it is riding up to her under arm which screams bad implant job. Her expression is extremely unhappy and once again the water makes her legs look weird but this time it makes look as if she has cottage cheese in her ass.

Now this picture (NSFW) is just too much and should have never made it into the pile. What hits me first is her facial expression. It says the following

“Hurry up and take the f**king picture already”

Her boobs are probably in great shape but they look like the aftermath of a bad boob job. I mean they look complete misshapen. And of course we have the water again making her lower body look like a Dali painting.

These pictures probably never made it to Hef since they were so horrible. Audrina is lucky that they did not send a hit squad of Playmates to take her down for looking completely horrible.

So how did this whole mess even happen in the first place? According to TMZ

In a statement made through her rep, Audrina tells TMZ "I took these photos years ago when I was just out of high school and beginning to model. I was young and very trusting of others and I didn't know to protect myself. It is a lesson learned, for myself, and hopefully for the young girls who look up to me."

I think what really happened was this. Audrina was the really hot popular girl in school who always got what wanted. And being that rich and popular she developed a mental schema that was afflicted with entitlement and narcissism. Feeling that her natural sexiness and the fact she was rich, she convinced herself she could be in Playboy.

She either got the photo editor of her high school year book or some photographer who convinced her that he could get her into Playboy. Either way they had no business taking these pictures because they display no fundamentals of camera angles and lighting. Then she probably went into her closet to find the most skanky outfits she could find and settled on something she wore for the senior class Halloween breakfast sans the top and the cowboy hat she got for flashing her boobs on Girls Gone Wild when she was in Cancun. Then she convinced her Daddy who probably has issues of his own about his relationship with his daughter to pony up the cash to pay for this abortion of a glamour model portfolio.

Whether it is a spread in Playboy or Vanity Fair, it takes an army of people to put together these photos, from a photographer, costume designer, set designer, makeup and a platoon of assistants. It seems like overkill but compare Audrina’s photos to any in Playboy and you will see the difference. Also Playboy is a classy men's magazine. They do not do anything pornish. In fact Hugh Hefner has a policy not to use women in porn.

Contrary to popular belief, Hugh Hefner does not only have young girls in Playboy but he has had more mature women show off their stuff. Some of them in their 50’s. Audrina’s body at that time had not fully developed. You can tell that she is still in the last stages of puberty and her body has still not decided on its final game plan. Also she needs to work out and tighten and tone all her lady parts. There is nothing wrong with having a big ass. Look at Jessica Alba and Jennifer Lopez, they have amazingly huge asses but they are not sagging and do not wiggle in the wrong places.

I had the time of my life

2008-03-05T20:33:00.000-08:00

I completely freaked out when I heard that Patrick Swayze had weeks to live. I calmed a little when it turned he was going for treatment. I cried during Dirty Dancing and Ghost but I think his best work was in Donnie Darko. A friend lent me the dvd and I held onto it for two years. Then one day my cable got disconnected because yours truly forgot to pay the bill. Anyways I had nothing to watch so I put on the DVD. It was my first introduction to the Gyllenhal kids. I found Jake to be quite yummy. But that movie completely blew my mind and I was blown way about how Swayze did a complete 180 with that role. In fact I watched that movie over and over for that entire night.

Patrick, we are praying for you.

Sitting Shiva

2008-01-27T23:09:00.000-08:00

So I got this email from this WSJ reporter.

Hi Prada Princess,
I cover luxury goods for the Wall Street Journal and I am looking for a consumer who spent too much on luxury goods over the past few years and is now reigning in spending amid some concern for the overall economy…was wondering if you or any of your friends might fit the bill…let me know. Thanks.

Rachel Dodes
Retail & Luxury Group
The Wall Street Journal

My response.

Ms. Dodes,

As much as I would love to dish about shopping sprees for Jimmy Choos shoes and driving the concierge crazy at Henri Bendel, I am in the middle of sitting Shiv'ah for Heath Ledger. I have learned there are bigger traumas in life than not being able to use your Amex Black.

I will correct you on one thing. When it comes to luxury goods, there is no such as thing as reigning in spending. You just look for more sample sales.

PP

Her response.

PP thanks for your note. I hope you saw my story today!
Best,
Rachel

Here is her story.

Maybe I am getting old but I am not really in the mood to think about luxury shopping or burning through the Amex black. I am just not concerned with that right now. In fact I haven't felt like blogging for awhile because of so much bulls**t going on in my life. But what I realize is that it is just bulls**t. There is no substance to it whatsoever.

None of your business

2007-12-04T21:24:00.000-08:00

"How much are you worth?"

I am going crazy working on this spreadsheet because I do not know how to do excel but being the idiot I am I mention that I have excel experience. So they dump the excel sh*t on me. I am barely hanging on when the Chat shows and wants to talk to finance.

"Excuse me?"

"How much are you worth?"

It isn't the question that annoys me but it is the way she asks it. It is in a nonchalant manner as if she asking the weather is like. She doesn't even set it up with an introduction. She just goes in for the kill. Some people would think that it is cool since it is upfront. But there is a time and place for that and she is extremely rude. But as my sister once told me. Rude people never know they are being rude.

I hold back. As much as I want to rip her head off. I have to do this file.

"I am in the middle of something right. Can I get back to you?"

"You can just give me a number off the top of yor head."

She does not get the hint. I am going to smack her.

I talk about having a trust fund but I only write about it here. I was raised to never talk about money in public unless it was people we "knew." I mean there are no hard and fast rules. But there are ways to talk about money. The Chat is not abiding by those rules either out of ignorance or malice.

I stop what I am doing and look at her straight in the eye.

"I am really busy right now. I think we should table this discussion for another time. Like never, since it is none of your business."

I go back to work she walks away.

Tense

2007-10-22T21:56:00.000-07:00

Every office has one. The person who is a complete busy body. Busy with other people's business but their own. We have 5 of them. They are a ghoulish gaggle of girls that remind of the claque. But less pretty and less rich.

We have the Toucher

I call her the toucher because she touches people, all the time. When you say hello to you as you pass her by she grabs your wrist and squeezes it. She has this annoying habit of putting her hand on your back if she is behind you. And it is not a love tap. It is a firm pat and drag down your back. It is especially annoying in the morning when you have only 4 hours sleep and haven't had your cappuccino. What makes it really creepy is that she is a 200 pound woman with flattop haircut. Did I mention she likes to wear designer jeans.

Meet the Chat.

This girl is always talking. Whether it is in a group, cell phone, at the copy machine, online. Even when she is not talking she is talking. I think she raised the quarterly profits of Verizon with texting alone. Maybe if she put this much attention into her work she would actually amount to something.

Billy girl,

This name was given by Rantman based on a some cartoon about a stupid boy, a girl,
and the grim reaper. She is really dumb. It Rantman three hours to explain to her the concept of ebay and how to use it. And like most dumb girls she is blond, beautiful and has an enormous rack. Which is probably the reason she hasn't been fired already.

The Engager

She has been engaged for a year and everything she does is all about her wedding. What type of ring she is getting, her wedding dress, her reception, her fiancee and her in laws. Which is the reason why she can't get her work done.

Blow

It seems every two hours she locks herself in the bathroom. I have walked by the bathroom only to hear her loud snorting. Then she talks about her rampant hay fever to cover up her taste for nose candy. Not only does she do it. She gives it to. The Crow spotted her coming out of the supply closet with one the guy employees with a paper towel pressed against her mouth.

I haven't blogged about these people because, well they are not worth it. Also they have been isolated in their own corner of the loft. But the game has changed. Orders from top has forced us all to consolidate and starting next week we have to play musical chairs with our desks. Word is that some of the space is being rented out to some other company. Not a good sign. Salad Dancer layoffs are in the air. Hedge fund money is starting to dry up.

I am tired of this. I know what is going to happen. Political turf wars, missing paper weights and eternal games of Who Moved My Cheese? Not looking forward to this.

Random conversation in the office.

2007-10-08T18:18:00.000-07:00

This was a conversation I heard around the office after the whole Vanessa Hudgens nudie picture.

"Would you do her?"

"Hell's no."

"Why? She's legal."

"Dude, look at that enormous afro growing in between her legs. Your d**k would get lost in that jungle."

"Yeah, she really needs to look into a brazilian wax."

Yes. I work with these people.

Before and after

2007-10-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

Anyways, Rantman was going apes**t over the new Indian Jones movie and he practically creamed in his jeans when he heard that Karen Allen from the first movie was in it.

When he saw the most recent photo he could not stop gushing over her.

"Isn't she beautiful?" He exclaimed.

"She had some work done." I said as I munched on a rice cake.

"No she didn't. She looks just like she did from the first movie."

"You can't look that good without help from a plastic surgeon."

"Karen Allen would never do that. She is so anti-hollywood. I mean she was in Animal House. That is just make up and lighting."

So I went back to my cube and did a search on Karen Allen and found smoking gun.

"Take a look at this." I said finishing off rice cake crumbs.

"Who the hell is that?"

"Dude, this is your girl friend."

"No f**kin way."

"Yes f**king away."

"Wow. She's old."

"It happens."

"She was my first childhood crush. Thanks for destroying those memories."

"Happy to help."

I don't know why but I got grim sense of satisfaction from what I did. I mean there is nothing wrong with plastic surgery. Once my parts start to sag I plan on getting them tightened up. As far as I know, Karen Allen looks fantastic and more power to her for going under the knife and the botox needle. From what little I know about her it appears that she is not the type of woman to deny she had plastic surgery unliek other celebrities.

But it was the fact that Rantman was so enamored that I realized that I needed to pull back the curtains to reveal what the wizard looked like.

Later that day I found out that Rantman was also a fan of the biggest loser and he also had a thing for Kim Lyons.

"Hey Rantman."

"Go away."

"Come over here. I have something to show you."

"No."

"Just go away."

"I am not going to leave you alone until you come over here."

"You are just going to crush my spirit."

"Exactly. Now you can get it over with now or I can drag out the pain for the next 3o months."

"Fine."

Rantman got up and walked over to my screen.

"That isn't who I think it is." He said with his eyebrows raised.

"Yup."

Then Salad Dancer and The Crow walked by.

"Gummi worm?" Salad Dancer offered.

"Who's the dude in the bikini?" Crow asked

"It's not a dude. Its Kim Lyons." Rantman muttered.

"Who's Kim Lyons?" asked Salad Dancer.

"Oh, uhh she's on the biggest loser." Crow answered.

"She is the trainer for the red team." Rantman muttered some more.

The Crow and Salad Dancer began to talk while, Rantman stared in horror and I just sat back watching the circus.
"I love that show. My favorite part is watching the final episode to see how much weight they all lost."

"Are you sure that's Kim and not her brother?"

"I knew those things were implants. I mean they are hardly move when she works out with her team."

"I always thought that it was just a really good sports bra."

"Sports bra is that good."

Then Rantman pulled a TMI.

"I have to pull her out of my spank bank."

"Spank bank? Oh. That is so gross!" groaned the Crow.

"Dude that is not cool. I do not need to know about your social life." chimed Salad Dancer.

I just grinned, pleased with myself for causing the train wreck.

"

About damn time: Oops she really did it this time

2007-10-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

Britney Spears has lost her kids. Big surprise. It was going to happen sooner or later. With reports of her doing drugs and partying every night, it was going to come to a head. She has been burning both ends of the candle, for goodness sake, she doesn't even have a driver's license.

It looks real bad for her mental state. I mean I don't see her pulling out of this one. When you have that much money and no one to say to stop except for yourself. It is unlikely you are going to change your bad habits. This I know from personal experience.

So what now girl? What are you going to do? You are going to clean yourself or keep being fodder for the tabloids?

We interrupt our regular program for bitching and moaning for this special announcement:

2007-09-28T01:51:00.000-07:00

I got this from someone named CharmingDinnerGuest. WARNING! SEX AND THE CITY MOVIE SPOILERS!

But ignore the St. Elsewhere references.

The long-infertile Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is now pregnant! In a scene shot Thursday morning on the corner of 70th & Lexington at a restaurant called Luni, Charlotte and Big are coming out of the restaurant when Charlotte's water breaks. She tries to hail a cab, when Big throws her in his car.
- Big and Carrie are moving in together and they are apartment-hunting in NYC.

I enjoy your blog and I wish you would post more often.

Thank you for the heads up. I know I should post more. But I have been feeling so blah lately. My life consists of work, tv and Ben and Jerry's.

Enough

2007-09-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

I am sick and tired of people cramming into the subway. I am sick and tired of having a starbucks coffee and a raisin bagel with cream cheese for breakfast. I am sick and tired of feeling fat and avoiding the scale. I am sick and tired of working at a job I really don't like. And I am sick and tired dealing with people who think they know who I am and especially those who have betrayed me.

TODAY IS THE BEST DAY EVER!

2007-09-19T16:28:00.000-07:00

Rant man sent me these photos.

CARRIE AND MR BIG! YAY!

I have to find out where they are filming. If anyone knows please email me.

VMAs 2007

2007-09-09T22:41:00.000-07:00

Worst performance

Britney Spears was a disaster, whoever picked out that outfit for her should be dragged out on the street and shot. she still has not lost the baby weight. However it might leftover flab from being in rehab. Apparently, weight gain is a common occurrence after doing your 28 days.

Even her lip-synching was off.

Best Performance

Alicia Keys cover of George Michael was fabulous. She just made the entire gay nation her new best friend.

CORRECTION! WORST PERFORMANCE SARAH SILVERMAN

Holy S**t, someone take this unfunny whore off the stage. Her Paris joke was so overdone and didn't even get a giggle. And her "I have a diarrhea" and her Kany West/Snowflake and Amy Winehouse was horrible. Oooh, that is so cutting edge. All she goes for is the shock and not the awe. Stick to selling clothes for the Gap.

A L.A.M.B to the slaughter

2007-09-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

It appears that Gwen Stefani's Japanese hooker line has failed to impress at fashion week.

September 6, 2007, 2:01 pm
Spring Rolls and Arm Candy

Last night I bolted out of the L.A.M.B show, nearly knocking over the publicist Paul Wilmot. Sorry, Paul. If ever there was a reason for a pop star to concentrate on her vocal skills, it was Gwen Stefani’s fashion meltdown. Among the words I wrote in my notebook, until my pen came to a stop, were “blob,” “very last season,” “bad secretary,” “astonishingly bad,” and “Ditzville.” I’m amazed—now—I had that much to say.

In all honesty we can't fault Gwennie for this disaster. She's a singer, she is used to having the best producers, lawyers, and sound engineers and lots and of Yes men. Since she was out of her element in fashion she did not know where to find the best fashion whores that would elevate her line of clothing beyond standard B&T wear for girls from Long Island. I mean the stuff is atrocious. The only girl who wear this stuff would be the bait girls who appear on "To Catch a Predator".

Of course she will make a fortune off this line regardless of the critics, since it is made in China and for all we know it is probably made of Chinese people. She probably thanks god for the Bridge and Tunnel crowd. There are the only people stupid enough to buy her crap.

Labor Day weekend Part 1

2007-09-05T21:52:00.000-07:00

"Oh my god, oh my god, I am on Fire Island, with three women. Everyone is going to think I am gay."

"If you keep whining like that everyone is really going to think your some type of mo."

This was one of many conversations between the Crow and her mutual friend while I lounged on the beach with Salad Dancer.

My plans for the Labor Day weekend were quite simple which was to spend it with my parents. For all of Saturday, I helped my Dad put together his new entertainment center which consisted of a Wii and a new DVD player and making these excellent biscuits with my Mother. Sunday, my parents were going to Chappaqua for a barbecue. Apparently a challenge was thrown down for everyone to bring something that was homemade, hence the biscuits.

I planned on house sitting for my parents when I got a call from Salad Dancer as I was munching on a bagel reading the Times.

“Want to come to the beach?” she asked

“In the Hamptons?” I replied happily

“I wish. No. Fire Island.”

“I thought you and the Crow were in the Hamptons?”

“The operative word is were.”

“What happened?”

“You want to go to the beach or not?” Salad Dancer said in an annoyed tone.

“Yeah, I want to go.”

“Meet us at Penn station by 9. When you get to the ticket booth ask for the Sunken Forest Package.”

So I threw in a towel, a bikini, sunscreen, a Sidney Sheldon book into my Whole Foods bag and ran off to Penn Station.

It was there I saw Salad Dancer and the Crow, looking quite hung over with their shades on, standing underneath the scheduling board.

“What’s up?”

“Ola.” Said Crow

Salad Dancer nodded gave me a nod and slight smile.

“So shall we be off?”

“This is your first time taking a train from Penn Station?”

“Uhh. Yeah.”

Crow took her sunglasses off.

“You see this herd of people? They are all waiting looking at that big board of letters and numbers, which will announce what track their train is on. When that happens all these people will stampede to that track and god help anyone in their way. In the meantime we wait. If you want to get to sit on train before departure than go to Grand Central.”

“Jesus f**king Christ. It’s a little early for acting like such a thunder b**tch. Can you at least wait until when we are at work? “

The Crow put her hand on her face in an act of exasperation.

“Sorry PP. It is just that..”

“Our Hamptons soiree got derailed and crashed and burned.” Interjected the Salad Dancer.

“And no. We don’t want to talk about it.” Finished the Crow.

“Okay. Anybody else will be joining us to Fire Island?”

“Yes. A mutual friend of ours.”

“Oh my f**king god!” I heard a voice bellow behind me and turned around. He was a tall thin man who could pass to be in his twenties but if you looked closer you could see the crow’s feet beginning to form around his eyes. He wore Old navy outfit of beige shorts and a white t-shirt.

“$2.40 for 2 doughnuts? I know this is Manhattan but this is unf**king believable.”

It was going to be a long trip.

Labor Day

2007-08-31T16:00:00.000-07:00

It is 4pm and the office is pretty much abandoned. I have been elected, more like drafted, to stay behind for a package deliver.

The Queen had a long talk with G and it has been decided Section 9, that is the name of our group, will taken of financial trends and be put on celebrity and gossip which was our original designation. Did I just write designation? I have been hanging out with these people too long.

Anyways, Salad Dancer and the Crow took off early today. Usually I would be a b**ch about being the sole survivor, but those two were basically sleeping in the office for the last two weeks. So I was willing to cut them some slack.

So here I am all alone. My plans are up in the air for Labor Day. I have been invited to a barbecue. Not sure if I will go. Not sure what I am doing with my life.

And why am I doing this?

2007-08-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

We are back on CNBC duty watching it very closely for some type of anomaly or benchmark or something.

Last week some fast talking consultant showed up when the market began to implode with a group of wall street suits into our office and had himself a pitch meeting. He was convinced that we could determine the direction of the market. The consultant barked out his plans point by point while the wall street suits wearing their hair high and tight.

The Queen was pissed as f**k. She had spent a ton of time being the lead on two projects and the last thing she wanted to deal with was this bulls**t again.

Then I heard some gossip from the Crow. Apparently the Wall Street Suits were part of some hedge fund/investment group and were completely at wits end at what to do next. So in comes captain consultant who they hired in desperation. Now according to the Crow, the rumor is that this group is done, but they are doing a hail mary play as a last ditch effort. According to Crow who heard this from one of the finance guys on our team, the consultant seeing that they were desperate for anything sold them on the idea if they hired a research group to do news analysis, they would be able to figure out a strategy to get out of the mess they were in.

Then we had another meeting with the Queen who gave us the real dirt.

"This is all an exercise in futility. This hedgefund is going down the drain. The hedgefund knows it, the consultant knows it, even the investors know it."

"Then what f**k are we doing here then?" asked Salad Dancer.

The Queen pulled out a fresh pack of DunHills from her LV hand bagk and proceeded to tap the bottom of it in into the palm of her hand.

"Rumor has it some of the wives of the investors are pretty pissed about what is going on." The Queen said as she proceeded to peel off the wrapper.

"So now some of the investors are demanding that the fund make an effort to make a comeback. So one of the heads of the fund contacted a consultant who contacted G."

"So this is all one big dog and pony show?" Salad Dancer grimaced.

"A show of CYA. It's for the wives and everyone's peace of mind. Everyone wants assurances that every effort was made. I talked to G. We'll be doing this for probably another so this is temporary. I don't like anymore than you all do. It is a complete waste of time, but G doesn't care, apparently the consultant is making a killing in billable hours and he is willing to spread the wealth before the milk money dries up and everyone puts their bras back on."

The Queen took out a lighter and walked off. "I'll be outside having a fag. Which means don't bother me."

After the meeting Salad Dancer was freaking out.

"Oh my god. Its the f**king dot com meltdown all over again. We are so f**ked."

The Crow piped in.

"It could be worse."

"How so?"

"We could be mortgage brokers."

Its crazy. I know. But it has taken my mind off the claque.

Claque attack.

2007-08-06T19:47:00.000-07:00

Those b**tches are back and with a vengance. I can barely write. I am so pissed and frustrated. I can't believe they hired VD. I am just as qualified to do that job. I need ice cream. STAT!

The Fall

2007-07-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

Oh Lindsay. I still believe in you.

FU from a Jew

2007-07-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

I read this today in the New York Times. And it really pissed me off.

July 22, 2007
Orthodox Paradox
By NOAH FELDMAN
A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the backyard of the
one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.

I didn’t want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation. “You’re kidding, right?” she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.

Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what I already knew. “It wasn’t me,” he said. I believed him.

Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school’s alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say “in contact,” but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him several updates about my life, for inclusion in the “Mazal Tov” section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When our son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The most recent news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of my reports made it into print.

It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of its consequences. But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is an anachronism. Many of my closest relationships are still with people who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand. What remains of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in the school’s formal publications, where my classmates’ growing families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated to prime us for the Ivy League. To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.

That aspiration is not without its difficulties. My own personal lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity — of Slobodka and St. Paul’s. In premodern Europe, where the state gave the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community. The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not a legal one. Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing of alumni newsletters.

Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school’s inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage.

Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience — that the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life will put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries. The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer fully in the community.

If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence. After all, the school’s attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive. For those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it almost worked.

Fitting In

Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the time put it, “a Jew in the home and a man in the street.” Even as we students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult members.

This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the “modern” in modern Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux, then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, “I don’t think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday.”) Whatever concerns Lieberman’s Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly believe in something. His Orthodoxy elicited none of the half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has already prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was, in some basic sense, weird.

Lieberman’s overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons. Morning prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which, though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted in “The Da Vinci Code.” Food restrictions are tight: a committed modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was prepared with a kosher knife).

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world. When followed precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that. Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of the rules borne by those who keep kosher. The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food.

And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world. Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible from memory. Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt immediate kinship. They read those same exact texts again and again — often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the American wilderness.

In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer’s wine-dark sea, then move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered, it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for “work” to have occurred? You might perform an act of work absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome — but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work’s taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.

Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge, our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.’s and near-doctorates to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were fantastic. One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy’s condemnation of homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer cluelessness of the administration. Lord only knows what teachers like him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways. (In the book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously transformed into Italian-Americans.)

In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to achieving it.

The Dynamics of Prohibition

For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.

One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.

Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young man than the question of our relationship to sex. Modernity, and maybe the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day of sex ed in seventh grade. I have the feeling that the content of our sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future. After the scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.

After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education. We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school’s standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to distract the males around them.

Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had been seen holding a girl’s hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday afternoon. The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.

My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, “in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage.” Rabbi Feinstein’s legal judgment with respect to romantic love among persons too young to marry was definitive. He prohibited it absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.

What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — “as though one had contracted the sickness of love.” Feinstein’s opinion directed my attention to a passage in Maimonides’s legal writings prohibiting various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as follows: “Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited.” I have never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don’ts that is Maimonides’s Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.

Difference and Reconciliation

I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals’ predicament seems absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a “scientific” doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for the evangelicals’ sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.

Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the fourth such “day.” Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. “The truth is,” he said, “despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time believing that man could be descended from monkeys.”

This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.

The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.

The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.

Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. Marrying a Jewish but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued belonging difficult. Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.

Us and Them

In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy’s line-drawing has been implicated in some truly horrifying events. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin’s peace efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely executed because he is in the act of killing Jews. In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced two Nobel Prize winners.)

Because of the proximity of Goldstein’s background and mine, the details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.

This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too.

Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.” The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.

To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”

It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.

Lives of Contradiction

Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. “But why not?” I asked. Her answer was illuminating. As someone who never took steps that would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.

For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven’t lost the wish to be treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living. But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my past. In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.

It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it. I was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who, naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn’t think so. Our life choices are constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but palpably, measurably so.

I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the conclusion. Couldn’t the contradictory world from which we sprang be just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference? Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions? My best friend just laughed.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

August 15, 1999
WEDDINGS; Noah Feldman and Jeannie Suk
Dr. Jeannie Chi Yong Suk, a daughter of Song Nam Suk and Dr. Chang Ho Suk of Great Neck, N.Y., is to be married this afternoon to Dr. Noah Raam Feldman, a son of Dr. Penny H. Feldman and Dr. Roy E. Feldman of Cambridge, Mass. Harold Hongju Koh, an Assistant Secretary of State, is to preside at the ceremony in the Harvard Club in Manhattan

Dr. Suk, 26, was until June a visiting lecturer on cultural exchange and interaction in literature at Yale College in New Haven, and an affiliate scholar at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in Manhattan.

In September, she will become a law student at Harvard University. She graduated from Yale and received a doctorate in philosophy in modern languages from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall scholar. She is keeping her name.

Her father is a gastroenterologist in Flushing, Queens. Her mother manages the practice and is a director of the Flushing branch of the Y.W.C.A.

Dr. Feldman, 29, was a clerk for Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court in Washington until last month. He is now a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows in Cambridge, where he is conducting research on legal theory and history. He graduated from Harvard and received a doctorate in Islamic thought from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He also holds a law degree from Yale.

His mother is a vice president of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the director of its Center for Home Care Policy and Research. His father is the president of Behavior Analysis Inc., a social policy consulting company in Cambridge.

This is Noah Feldman's way of telling them f**k you. And if I was him, I would feel the exact same way. My parents used to tell me that when you disrespect a man's wife, you disrespect the man. And a proper husband doesn't tolerate that.

This guy is not some idiot who owns s dry cleaners in forest hills and his wife isn't some Vietnamese hooker he found in a mail order bride service. They both come from good families and are quite brilliant. I mean the wife alone could take on my entire graduating college class in any academic challenge. Law school was probably a breeze. And the husband. HE'S A F**KING HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR! That is like becoming Pope. Hell, I would marry him. Unfortunately the Korean American girl was faster on her feet.

And this is how is Yeshiva treats him? One day this guy will be honored by Israel and then the next class reunion will be quite awkward. What it all comes down to is that these people are just too stupid, arrogant and stubborn. And they feel it justifies the way they treat him and his wife. F**k em. Noah and Jeannie are better off without them.

Smacking Silverman

2007-07-08T19:04:00.000-07:00

This is going to come as a shock to all of you but I have never found Sarah Silverman all that funny. Her shtick is this whole ,"Look at me I'm a Jewish girl and I am going to say offensive things about Chinese people when in fact I love them." That incident on Conan O'brien has been pretty much her career high point. I mean did you see her at the MTV movie awards? I was not impressed/ She had one or tow jokes about Paris Hilton and jail, but even a monkey can pull that off. The fact of the matter is that she can only do shows that have puppets in them. In fact she is no better than Carrot Top who is actually more original.

Awhile ago, I saw a promo of hers on Comedy Central about her new show. She made this joke about Huey Lewis and the news sending her a fan letter. When I saw this I was like How is this funny? Who the hell is Huey Lewis and News? Then I did a search and found out that Jimmy Kimmel, her latest comedic sugar daddy is a huge fan. Oh wow. Inside joke. You are so cool. HELLO! I am sure this was really funny when she was thinking this up but here's the problem. NOBODY CARES!

Awhile ago, they did a profile of her in the NYT magazine. It was basically a masturbation piece as Sarah tried to play serious yet unfunny.

I know I am going to catch flak from members of the J*P nation but some of the stuff she said was just ripe for a smack down.

January 21, 2007
Questions for Sarah Silverman
Funny Girl
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Q: The opening credits of your new television sitcom, “The Sarah Silverman Program,” include a scenic glimpse of a cemetery plot, as your voice explains that your parents are both deceased.

Is that actually true? No. They’re both pretty retired.

Translation: They are not going yet. They vowed they will not leave this earth until I give them a grandchild or two. In other words they will live forever.

How do they feel about being knocked off in your show, which makes its debut on Comedy Central on Feb. 1?

They’re fine with it. It was a way to bring a little bit of pathos to a self-centered character. It’s like Mr. Rogers said, There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love if you knew their whole story, and I figured if I added dead parents —

Translation: They don't care. As long as the series stays on the air. They were so happy when Greg the Bunny was picked up because they thought they wouldn't have to support me anymore but then it got cancelled. Then Jesus is Magic came out and they figured, "This is it. Our little latke is going to pull a Passion of the Christ get all the New Testament goyum to see her movie and we won't have to pay for her rent."

Even so, the show’s protagonist, who is named Sarah Silverman, is not exactly Mr. Rogers’s type. A model of political incorrectness, she becomes enraged when she is forced to watch a commercial for a humanitarian-aid group. Whom is she based on?

I would describe her as ignorant and arrogant. The character is a lot of myself and a lot of my mother.

Translation: Trying to actually look at other source material would require effort. It is just easier to look within myself. It is pretty easy to do since it is a shallow pool.

Much like Sacha Baron Cohen, you specialize in a kind of shock comedy that seems designed to give offense. What do you think of him?

“Borat” was the most retarded yet most important movie I’ve seen in many years.

Translation: I hate Sacha Baron Cohen. I was the one who started the offensive shtick. He practically ripped off Jesus is Magic. But I can't sound bitter. Better say something that is completely contradiction so I look edgy.

In the documentary “The Aristocrats,” you set a new record for outrageousness by claiming, with a straight face, “Joe Franklin raped me,” referring to the elderly television host. I heard that he threatened to sue you.

I’m pretty sure he wasn’t really mad. I think he was just milking the extra publicity.

Translation: Thank god Joe Franklin threatened to sue me. There were so many more talent comedians than myself and I was afraid they would drown me out. But as soon as Joe Franklin went ballistic, I was so happy. That means the waiters are Olive Garden will remember me when I come back.

Do you see your work as social commentary? I don’t see it as anything.

I try not to look at it. Deconstruction is a comedy killer.

Translation: Dude. I have no idea what I am doing. I just say really offensive things and hopefully people will either laugh or get offended. Either way I get noticed. The moment someone actually analyzes what I am doing I am so screwed because then they will realize I have no talent and there is no point in listening to me.

How are things going with your comedic other, Jimmy Kimmel?

Excellently! All my friends are comics, but I don’t know that you would know them — Mark Cohen, Doug Benson, Todd Glass, Todd Barry.

Translation: Oh thank god for Jimmy Kimel. I thought I reached my top of the comedy star f**king ladder after Shandling. If it wasn't for him I don't think anyone would notice me. However it is nice to know I have back up comedians if Jimmy and I don't work out.

Why don’t you have any female friends?

Tig Notaro, she’s a woman. She’s probably one of my best friends. She’s a comedian.

Translation: Because I screwed all of their boyfriends. That one I think is still in the closet.

Tell us about your childhood in Bedford, N.H., where you were the youngest of four daughters. Isn’t your oldest sister a rabbi?

She got into it on her own, after grad school, even. We grew up in a place with very few Jews. I didn’t look like the other kids. I had hairy legs, hairy arms, hair everywhere. I looked like a little monkey.

Translation: It really works out because when I have kids, I can get a good deal with the bar and bat mitzvahs.

This doesn’t sound like a description of an idyllic childhood.

I wouldn’t want to do it again. I had a lot of depression as a kid. During adolescence, you mean? From 13 to 16. I didn’t go to school for months. It was so awful. I didn’t know how to express what it was. I remember trying to explain it to my stepdad and saying, “I feel like that terrible homesick feeling, but I’m home.”

Translation: Which made it really awkward every summer when I returned home from camp.

Were you treated at the time for depression?

I had very bad experiences with doctors. I got sent to a psychiatrist who put me on Xanax when I was 13. I went back for my next visit, and he had killed himself.

Translation: I was pissed because he didn't even invite me to join him.

That’s a pretty good story, but is it true?

I swear to God. I had to wait for the rest of the hour for my mom to pick me up.

Translation: Dude, even my mom didn't believe me.

You eventually wound up at New York University, where you dropped out after a year to work in comedy clubs.

I didn’t really drop out. I just didn’t go back.

Translation: See. That is me being edgy. Only really smart people notice my use of semantics.

Do you wish your new show were appearing on HBO, if only because Comedy Central bleeps out the swear words?

No, I spent two years developing shows at HBO, right before this. I wrote two pilots with Larry Charles. Neither of them was even shot. They’re so good too.

Translation: They were ood because they were never shot in the first place. If they were produced my career would have been over since people would realize that I have no talent.

And then you were rescued by Comedy Central. Yes, I’m one of those lucky people who’s attracted to people who like me.

Translation: I am one of those lucky people who's attracted to a boyfriend who still has connections with Comedy Central.

What I am doing now.

2007-07-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

Obviously inside my apartment.

Can't deal

2007-06-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

I am in my bed. I am trying to forget the day. Air conditioning feels good. But I don't think it will be enough. I should blog about today. But it is just too painful to write about. Maybe later.

Runaway

2007-06-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

I got yelled at by my boss not once but twice. It was my fault since I was just giving out directions and I forgot to fill out an expense form which I have been doing since I started here.

You have no idea what rage is until a woman with a British accent ripping into you.

I don't want to go to work tomorrow. I just want to take the next plane to Australia.

Who's with me?

I'm alive

2007-06-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

Funny. This is supposed to be summer but I have been insanely busy. I need a vacation. Think about going to Asia for a year.

Great ball of fire.

2007-05-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

I am in pain. Fell asleep on the beach. Forgot my SPF. I feel like a tater tot. I love the Hamptons. Thank God I didn't go topless. There is a very tasty new guy in the office and my nipples would be inflamed every time he walked past me.

Friday night with the family.

2007-05-27T00:09:00.001-07:00

"I'm not going to apologize."

"I don't want you to apologize. I just want you to stop yelling at me."

"Can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Part of the job of being a dad. Union rules."

I shoved another piece of steak in my mouth and while I chewed I began to collect my thoughts trying to figure out a way to get my dad to back off without screaming at him. It was last Friday night ( Not yesterday) and I was trying not shovel my food and get out. I was going to make the effort to hold my composure.

"Isn't nice to have a pleasant conversation over steaks." said my mother as she poured her 2nd glass of wine.

A client of my father's had just come back from Kansas on a business trip and brought back a surplus of porterhouses that would choke Rosie O'Donnell. Unfortunately, Dad is on a strict no meat diet and had to give them away to his partners but Mom allowed the treat of having steak for one night. It was no coincidence that it was the night I was visiting them.

My Dad loves red meat. He practically lived on Mickey D's cheeseburgers for his first year in law school. A couple of years ago the doctor said that he was on the express elevator to hell if he kept up with his diet from law school. So Mom put the kibosh on dead cow. However, every now and then she allows my Dad to treat himself.

I watched my Dad carve a piece of bloody rare meat with the skill of neurosurgeon. He would then raise to his lips and then pause in the anticipation of eating it and then he would slowly put it in his mouth. It didn't seem like he was chewing but more like he was rolling it in his mouth like it was wine. He seemed to be a zen like trance as he savored the steak.

Then realized why she wanted me to come to dinner on Friday. Since steak was such a treat my Dad would more focused in eating it rather than screaming at me. Even he was jabbing away at me with his words, they seem to be less pointed and sharp.

I looked at my Mom. She seemed relaxed but I realized her guard wasn't down. She had barely touched her steak and instead was more focused on both us and adjusting the grasp on her wine glass. She wasn't going to play referee, but she was ready to break us up if things got heated.

I swallowed my steak and my anger and spoke.

"Why were you so worked up over my finances during Passover?"

"Because you are not paying attention to them."

"I have a trust fund. It is no big deal."

My Dad stopped chewing and put his knife and fork down. He then looked at my Mother who smiled at him. But it wasn't a friendly, it was the smile that said "Watch it." I remember seeing Mother flash that smile many times as a child when I would whine in front of company or do something that made her look bad.

Then my father looked at me trying hold on to the zen like trance his steak had given him.

"Do you remember Vanity Case?" My Father asked.

It's not her real name. But I gave her that nick name because she was constantly primping herself whenever I saw her at parties. She was obsessed with being made up to the point she would sneak off to Henri Bendel when she was at Horace Mann. She ended up going to FIT, then dropped out because she realized she wanted to be a fashion model rather than a fashion designer. But that was unlikely to happen since she was 5'4.

"Yeah. She wanted to be a model, I am not sure how that worked out."

"Well she was, in Japan." My father said cutting another piece of steak.

"That's not surprising, she probably fulfilled their height requirements."

My Dad began to pick away at his garlic mashed potatoes. It was as if he was wondering he should eat the potatoes or talk. He chose the latter.

"A week before Passover her father called me in tears. Apparently Vanity Case was a victim of a very unscruplous financial advisor."

Dad began to stir around his garlic mashed potatoes and stared at it.

As he continued the story, I began to cringe because I have heard this story many a time.

At a party in Ibizia the snake wrapped himself around Vanity Case and that night convinced Vanity Case that she was in need of her services. Apparently he was quite convincing because she handed him the reigns of her entire portfolio.

A couple months later she gets an email stating from the snake what she wants to do with her remaining 15 grand which completely freaked out Vanity Case since she had so much more money than that. Now they are in the process of suing the snake, but my Dad thinks it is a lost cause because Snake can just argue that he was following the orders of Vanity Case. He rambled on with some more legalese but basically Vanity Case is pretty much f**ked.

I don't like to advertise who I am and that I have a trust fund. Okay. I talk about it waaay to much on my blog. But I avoid talking about it in public and only discuss it with close friends and family. Because it attracts the wrong type of attention.

In college there was a boy I knew who let it be known that he was a trust fund baby. Even though people who never met him, as soon as they heard his name they assumed he was a jerk. He ended up rushing for the same fraternity three times. But they never acceted him. The only reason why they kept him around was that he always bought everyone pot.

People already assume your rich or well off when you tell them you live in New York City. I already have enough drama in my life already. The worst are hanger ons. Especially in the Hamptons. You get people trying to crash parties or sneaking into houses. It's really annoying.

"Dad." I said.

My Father looked up from his plate. There was a lost look on his face.

"I'll take better care of my finances."

"I hope so. Because if I get that call, I'll have a heart attack."

Conversation with Mom

2007-05-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I am crazy busy with work. You have no idea how exhausting it is to watch the news."

"You can spare one night can't you?"

"Not with him."

"He's your Father."

"He's a mega douche."

"He's still your Father."

"I am not going to go through another Passover. That was uncalled for the way he acted toward me."

"Just come have dinner with us this week. Can you at least think about it."

"I'll get back to you."

"Good. We'll see you this Friday."

"Mom. I didn't say yes. I said I will get back to you."

"See you at 7."

Boys and their toys

2007-05-07T19:31:00.001-07:00

I sent this to my Big Sister.

May 7, 2007 -- DOES the New York Times brainwash its editors into being so politically correct it affects the way they raise their kids? In his upcoming book, "Father Knows Less," the Gray Lady's city editor Wendell Jamieson writes how he worried about "giving in to sexist stereotypes by so enthusiastically encouraging" his toddler son Dean's love of trucks and buses. So he and his wife, Helene, bought the boy a toy kitchen with a play oven and microwave. Then they gave him "a girl doll [with] blond hair and a blue-checkered dress." Luckily, the youngster's masculinity prevailed - one day Jamieson found the doll stuffed in the toy microwave.

This was her response.

these people are absolute tools.

boys like trucks.
boys like to flirt with women.

this I see every single time I bring my son out.

I'm not a mother, yet. But I have to agree with my sister on this. I mean boy are boys and girls are girls. Of course there are exceptions. But in the general order of things if you give a white towel to a girl they will turn it into a veil and imagine their wedding. Give a white towel to a boy and he will turn it into a rat tail and crack a the nearest unsuspecting fanny.

This makes alot of sense

2007-04-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

I knew it!

Lesbians twice as likely to be obese

LESBIANS are twice as likely as heterosexual women to be overweight or obese, which puts them at greater risk for obesity-related health problems and death, US researchers said.

The report, published in the American Journal of Public Health, is one of the first large studies to look at obesity among lesbians.

Ulrike Boehmer of the Boston University School of Public Health and colleagues looked at a 2002 national survey of almost 6000 women, and found that lesbians were 2.69 times more likely to be overweight and 2.47 times more likely to be obese.

“Lesbians have more than twice the odds of (being) overweight,” the authors wrote.

This would put them at a higher risk for diabetes and heart disease, among other ailments.

“Our findings indicate that lesbian sexual identity is linked to a greater prevalence of overweight and obesity,” the authors wrote in the study, released this week.

They reviewed smaller studies that have suggested a higher prevalence of obesity among lesbians and the possible reasons why.

“The results of these studies indicate that lesbian women have a better body image than do heterosexual women,” they wrote.

But the authors said they placed little confidence in the idea that lesbians were more muscular than straight women, and thus were more likely to have a high body mass index, or BMI, while having little body fat.

High muscle mass is “unlikely to lead to classification as obese,” the researchers said.

“We reported greater odds of both overweight and obesity in lesbians and we feel confident in asserting that these differences are a result of increased adiposity,” the researchers wrote.

I can see a new diet craze coming called the straight diet. Just convert to Christianity, turn against Roe vs. Wade, watch every Mel Gibson and become a tight ass conservative. After all it worked for Ann Coulter.

Reflection

2007-04-26T22:26:00.000-07:00

I haven't written because, well after last week, my problems feel so small. It is horrible to see what one human being can do to others. And in a place where people are supposed to be safe and innocent it just hurts so much.

How can someone have so much anger inside them?

It just doesn't make any sense

Passover Madness

2007-04-15T19:28:00.000-07:00

It was Thanksgiving all over again as my Dad began ripping into me at Passover.

"How much money do you have in your portfolio?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I think I have UNDISCLOSED AMOUNT."

"You think? You think? When is the last time you checked your portfolio."

"I think it was three weeks ago."

"What?"

I started to slowly sip my water as my father begin to rip me open.

"What the hell is the matter with you? You should be checking your accounts everyday or at least once a week. How do you know if your money is all there? How do you know no one is stealing from you?"

"I don't. I'm sorry. I'll check on it more often."

"Maybe if you weren't shopping with your friends all the time and spent more time managing your finances."

Then like a nuclear bomb, I went off.

"For your f**king information, I have been spending my time at work and have had to play office politics while my job hung in the balance. And another thing, I haven't gone shopping since I started working and I have no friends since they all abandoned me. "

At this point checks were wet with my own tears. Then I got up and went to my room.

Kim Spin

2007-04-02T20:34:00.000-07:00

I was flipping the channels when I caught this on Extra.

Now if you don't know who Kim Kardashian, she is basically famous for pretty much nothing. Just like Paris Hilton. Recently she joined the Paris Hilton club when a sex tape of her greatest performances was released. Even though she is suing the company that is releasing it, they went ahead with it anyway. In fact they made a big deal about it because

It marks the first ever "day and date" celebrity sex tape release in downloadable format.

Now you would think once this would happen, she bury her head in her sand but instead she is doing a segment on Extra about her new fashion store "Dash".

She is quoted saying

“I’m a business woman,” Kim assured us. “I’m not the crazy, wild party girl people think I am. I don’t even drink alcohol, I don’t even smoke.”

“My boobs have a zip code of their own,” Barberie joked, adding that she values Kim’s opinion.

But Kim’s opinions don’t end with fashion; she also has a lot to say on everything, starting with what makes people sexy: “When you start doing things that make you feel good, you build up a confidence, and confidence is sexy.”

Kardashian also opened up about the mistakes she may have made in life.

“I try not to say that I've made mistakes even if they seem really stupid, as long as you learn from them,” she said. "And I really try to learn from the poor choices I've made."

Kim credits mom Kris and step-dad and former Olympic champion Bruce Jenner with keeping her grounded. She also thanks her godmother, Kathie Lee Gifford, for the best advice a young woman could ever get.

"She said, ‘If you find what you love to do and figure out a way to make money at it, you'll be happy,’” Kim shared.

Back in college, I took a course in politics and communication. There was this one PR guru, I forget his name but he is famous for those ads that rip apart George W. Bush during the last election. He said a key tactic in political ads is to create, a narrative and then keep presenting the narrative over and over again. He called it framing. The example he used was Clinton's first presidential campaign when he was attacked as a womanizing pot smoker. But his campaign were able to steer the public's attention towards his positive assets as a leader of the free world.

When I was watching this segment on Kim, I realized this was simply another variation of the framing technique. Right now, a billion guys are spending 35 bucks and change to see her get plowed by her African American ex. So her PR people have have created a narrative that Kim is not a party girl but a young lady out to make something of her life. That despite being associated with the glitterati, she is actually a wholesome young girl out do her own thing.

Now she doesn't discuss her sex tape, since her PR people probably made Extra sign an oath in blood. But she does mention making mistakes she has made in her past which is a very light reference to the sex tape. She is taking responsibility for her own actions but instead of beign ashamed she saying to the world she embraces her mistakes because she has learned from them.

Of course she is no Julie Andrews, but the closest she talks about sex is equating confidence with being sexy and how that it is a positive virtue.

If you also look at her outfit, its pretty much conservative for LA. In fact all footage of her has her chest covered up. So why all this damage control? It's obvious. Eventually she wants to expand her fashion line for middle America. She wants to be able to eventually sell her clothes at Wal-Mart. And Wal-Mart doesn't even allow Maxim magazine in their stores and they definitely would not allow an unintentional amateur porn star to sell her wares in their stores?

Why the hell would she mention the fact that Kathie Lee Gifford is her Godmother? Because like it or not, Kathie Lee Gifford appeals to that Wal-Mart demographic. I mean how else do you explain her career? Once the public is more acquainted with this new image, stores like Wal-mart will be more inclined to do business with a designer known for selling trendy clothes then her sexual prowess.

She can't simply let this whole sex tape thing blow over. One of the things my professor told me that in politics the biggest mistakes that politicians make is when they try to gloss over something that is quite major. She would use Watergate as an example saying hat if Nixon had simply fessed up and created a narrative to what was going on, he probably would have never had to resign.

Kim can't properly expand her business if this sex tape thing is still over her head. She has to be diplomatically aggressive by creating her own narrative of her own image.

I bet her mom and step dad Bruce Jenner had to be dragged by their ankles to even appear in the segment. If you notice, they don't say a word. They are just in the B-roll. They are probably still so humiliated by what Kim did, that they probably told her PR people to go f**k themselves when they brought up this idea.

Will it work? So far Paris is getting work and Pam Anderson still gets calls to do tv shows. MAybe Kim has just dodged a bullet.

Constipated

2007-03-27T22:49:00.000-07:00

Salad Dancer was raving about this Mexican place in Clinton. Apparently it was one of the few places in the city that served authentic Mexican cuisine and one of our interns run uptown to pick it up.

I must have broken about like a million kosher laws because that food was chock full of lard. Of course what didn't help was the Jalapeno peppers in oil. I think that is the sole reason why buns feels like it is on flames. This is one of the reasons why I am not a back door girl.

I should be working on my taxes tonight but I feel so bloated.

WTF

2007-03-16T21:10:00.001-07:00

We had a mutiny today. Salad Dancer went completely bonkers after reading some research on the stock market. But it wasn't because of doing the research but because she was learning.

"Oh my god! We are so f**ked!"

She kept talking about the cycle and how this was going to be such a huge correction. The Crow calmed her down with some hot cocoa and a bagel.

Salad Dancer had been completely out of it. Half of her circle of friends have moved to Astoria because their landlords had been jacking up the rents. And it seems she will be the only one left. And she has made it clear to everyone that she will never move to Queens.

The Queen demanded what was going on and the next thing you know we were all screaming about the amount of stress we have been under. It has gotten to the point where every time I hear the CNBC background music I want to throw up.

But all the shouting stopped when we got the order from G that everyone should leave early because of the weather.

So hear I am now, catching up on my Gray's Anatomy.

Snuggle away

2007-03-09T23:51:00.000-08:00

I am in my bed wrapped in my comforter with a belly full of Entenman cookies and soy milk. It is a wonderful remedy for the shots of tequila I did in the office that I did about 5 hours ago.

"Do we have any 7UP? I want to do slammers!" yelled out Salad Dancer.

It was around 8 that we finished our reports on the media coverage of the finance industry. When the market took a dive, everything went haywire. We were just putting the Oscar reports to bed when all of a sudden we were sitting in front of CNBC and learning terms like short trades, shares, sub prime and hedgefunds. Stuff that you hear at a Wharton alumni dinner.

A very big client that specialized in peddling information to suck...I mean inexperienced investors. They wanted a better feel for the way the media was presenting this whole stock market party so they could better tailor their products.

Our finance group had been disbanded and G was outsourcing the finance projects to some contractors. The contractors wanted nothing to do with this since they had their hands full already. I also suspect that they probably felt it was beneath them so it landed on our prestigious laps.

My group nearly had a mental break down when we were thrown this finance project. None of us have a finance background. The Crow started screaming about how she could barley balance her check book. Salad Dancer demanded that she call her accountant because there was no way in hell she could pull this off. Rantman was just being rantman. He went on about how the whole market was a rigged casino.

As for myself, I was just busy trying to remember algebra which I took when I was in high school.

Then the Queen told us to shut out collective traps and informed us that there would be no number crunching involved. All we had to do was to analyze the media coverage of what was going on in the market.

After everyone got changed into some dry underwear, we all went to work. Considering what was going on, alot of the coverage was surprisingly positive. I am not just talking about the newscasters trying to spin it around but also their clothes. I did not see anything that seem to denote funeral colors.

Overall it was a very easy assignment because all we were doing was analyzing their coverage in terms of their raction to the market. It was pertty straight forward. But it was so f**king mind numbing. At one point Salad Dancer wanted to roll in a tv with the Spice channel on just to make things more interesting. I ralize now why investment bankers and wall street types blow their money on luxury items. They need to do stuff that doesn't remind them of where they work.

We finally put our phone book together and that point it was 8. Rantman left to go see 300, while Salad Dancer, The Crow and the Queen were trying to figure out their plans for the evening. They decided the best way to inspired for a night on the town was a pre-game warmup of Tequila.

We didn't have 7Up but we did have a couple of cans of Cherry coke. That really hit the stop. After our 3rd shot, the girls decided to hit the east village. I just wanted to go home. Besides, the BS would be coming in town this weekend.

I am not thinking about anything else. I just want to sleep.

It only gets worse

2007-03-01T22:39:00.000-08:00

Holy s**t. Right after the Oscars. Then the market starts to crash. If I have to watch Maria Bartilomo's lollipop shaped head for another hour, I will puke.

After the Oscars

2007-02-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

I am riding on a high of red bulls and chocolate chip cookies. This was my fuel last night while watching the Oscars and writing my reports. I had 4 hours of sleep after putting together my media analysis of the Oscars for my boss the Queen. And with her sharp British accent and tabloid fortitude she will tear it apart.

Already I know it is going to be a long day because Rant man is in rare form screaming about discriminatory the Oscars were despite the fact the African America and Mexican faction totally ripped apart their European counterparts. As soon as I walked into the office he demanded that I look at this site.

What probably sucked the most was how little recognition Infernal Affairs received for being the original source material for The Departed, which won several Oscars including Best Picture. Martin Scorsese, ever the director's director, did acknowledge Andrew Lau ("Andrew Law," I think he called him) in his acceptance speech for Best Director. But when it won for Best Adapted Screenplay, the announcer said The Departed was adapted from a Japanese film. Completely wrong. What a slap in the face. The guys who write the copy couldn't do even the basic freaking level of research? I guess all Asians really are alike to them. And when it won for Best Picture, producer Graham King made absolutely no mention of Infernal Affairs at all. You've got the top spot of the evening and you can't throw a bone to the movie that made your win possible? That's disrespect.

I glad that Al Gore won because Rant Man would have been tearing the office apart screaming of a conspiracy.

Overall, I think the Oscars were, well, they were just there. I was glad Jennifer Hudson won. Now that is a big f**k you to Simon Cowell. I am a big fan of Alan Arkin ever since I saw Slums of Beverly Hills but I was really gunning for Eddie Murphy. Mark Whalberg, thank god, did not win. His ego is big enough as it is. Bad enough he’s from Boston. Helen Mirren you will always be Queen. Forrest Whitaker, the moment I saw you in the Crying Game I knew you were the man.

Ellen was being Ellen. I am glad that did costume changes with her suits.

What I am really not looking forward to is the amount of television we are going to watch to day. The Queen had three tivos rigged in the office to record the Oscars so I know we will be going through them today with a fine toothed comb.

You are probably wondering why the hell anyone would pay money for analysis of the Oscars. Well the Oscars are considered to be the gold standard for award ceremonies. Every angle is analyzed to see where they succeeded and failed, from the red carpet to the musical numbers. I won’t name our clients but there is a significant portion of the award show industry who will be reading our reports. I know, hard to believe there is such thing as the “Award show” industry. I am not surprised that they look towards the Oscars for new tricks to liven things up. If you think about it award shows are pretty standard. A bunch of people get nominated, they show up at a ceremony that is led by a two bit comedian, awards are given out, speeches are made and the rest of the night is dedicated to draining a couple of kegs.

They do what they can to make it fresh even if it means cannibalizing other shows to do it. Starting to come down. Better freshen up with another Redbull. Looks like the cast coming together. Salad dancer walks in with Crow. The two are cackling away about the Oscars. Sounding more excited than they are supposed to be, as if they were at the Oscars. I hope Salad Dancer brushed her teeth because I thought my face was going to melt off because of her breath.

Here’s the Queen followed behind by her loyal assistant, it appears she hasn’t had her morning coffee yet. Time to split.

Nostalgia is dead

2007-02-23T18:59:00.001-08:00

Nostalgia is dead

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker once about nostalgia. He was raised in the 80’s where he gorged himself on 80’s television staples like the A-team and Miami Vice. It was the era where Michael Mann and Stephen J. Cannel ruled the airwaves.

One of his favorite shows was the cartoon GIJoe. He always watched the mini series and when it began to air every day he was at his television right after school. The best days were Fridays when he would get together with his friends to watch the episodes. What was even better was when the Transformers were added to the line up.

Then the shows were canceled and they only lived in his memories. When the years passed he would hear a theme song or see a random toy in a store and he would remember those days. Then in college he found like-minded geeks who also remember those days and they relived it bootleg tapes of their favorite cartoons.

But now as he put it, Nostalgia is dead. As soon as a show is cancelled it is packed in a DVD to be sold on the Internet. Eventually all shows will be available to watch online. Even the commercials of that were shown at that time. There is no such thing as the generation gap because if someone older spouts out something that seems antiquated, well all someone has to do is go online to figure out what those words means. The phrase “You needed to be there.” doesn’t mean anything because you don’t have to be there; all you have to d is go to wikipedia.

Then he got a little weird. And begin talking about nostalgia as loss, mourning, remembrance of days gone past. His argument was that without nostalgia there is no meaning that is why the life cycle of television is now so quick and meaningless.

I am thinking about this as I stare at my DVR that contains the final episode of the OC. I am unsure what to do. Should I wait a couple of more weeks before I watch the final episode or should I just get it over with? When I saw the first episode I instantly fell in love with the story of a kid from Chino living in a posh suburb that even his parents couldn’t afford to live in.

Now it is all over, like a high school summer romance. But I don’t want it to need. I want that same feeling I get every night the show is on. I am afraid I am going to lose that feeling. That it will be just another show.

I admit it. I lost interest after they killed off Mischa Barton, but I slowly started to get back into it. Then they decide to pull the plug.

I’ll wait another day.

Holy Sh*t!

2007-02-18T20:52:00.000-08:00

This is f**ked in the head.

As anyone who has read my blog, I have had my freak out moments. I averaged two about a year during college. One time it was so bad that my big sister had to fly out for the weekend to coax me out from under my desk. My last meltdown was when I was freaking out over the fact I was so overwhelmed with school work. It stopped before it went past stage one, which is when I order a family sized bucket of chicken, when my parents showed up and surprised me since they were on their way coming home from Asia.

It was a strange day because I should have been studying but instead I spent the whole time eating with my parents and looking at their pictures from their trip to Asia. After they left, I felt, well at peace. It was weird. I mean I saw everything beyond my problems. If I screwed up my classes, I could always do summer school. It would suck but it wasn't the end of the world.

This goes beyond her being a celebrity. This about a woman who is in serious trouble. I have nothing against a woman shaving her head, but the way she went about doing it, I mean this isn't normal.

Leverage: Part 2

2007-02-13T23:41:00.000-08:00

"You said I would throw their families into Guantanomo Bay? Jesus Christ,who the hell do you think I am? Alberto Gonzales?"

"I was really pissed. The whore called me a J*P and they called where I work a virgin hellhole."

My Dad became silent on the phone.

Thanks to my trusty intern, I managed to get the Christmas presents wrapped and sent out by 8:30 pm. As soon as I got home I called to tell my Dad what happened. He made me describe what happened from the moment I walked in and what I said. He asked for every detail including what people said, how they acted and what their faces looked like.

I have to admit it was very unpleasant since it was a very f**ked up morning and I had no desire to relive it. But it was necessary. My father first cut his teeth in law by helping people who were in need of legal help while he was in law school. He learned very quickly that a lawyer was only as effective as their client. It is either full disclosure or nothing. A good lawyer wants to hear everything so they can prepare themselves when it comes up in court. If this was going to blow up, he wanted me to be prepared to take those hits.

"Sweetie, I have to make something very clear. Did you make any remarks about their race or religion? Their physical features?"

"No."

"Are these girls African American, Latino or Asian?"

"No. They are just generic white girls from Long Island. Straight up B&T."

"Did you ever call them B&T?"

"No."

"Did you ever make negative remarks about Long Island or New Jersey?"

"No."

"What about the other intern? What is his ethnic background?"

"He's Asian."

"Did you make any disparaging remarks about his race? Any references to Rosie ODonnell and the ching chong incident?"

"No. "

"Not even in a joking manner? Did you ever ask him if he was related to Bruce Lee or if he was good at math or has he ever eaten a dog?"

"No. I was really nice to him."

"Your whole interaction with HR, your boss and the interns was solely focused on the poor performance of those interns?"

"Yes. "

"The interns were the ones that made the J*p comment and other disparaging remarks?"

"Yes."

"Did you raise that chair high enough to be noticed?"

"I don't know."

"There's no I don't know. I don't know is bad. It means we are dealing with the unknown and judges hate the unknown. Depending on how they feel that day they will either rule for or against you."

"Do you think this will go to court?"

"I don't know."

"Thanks Dad."

"What do you remember about the chair?"

"I grabbed it and began to raise it and my boss stopped me and told me it wasn't worth it."

"Did you raise it over your head?"

"No."

"Above your waist?"

"No."

"Can you estimate how many inches off the ground?"

"Maybe an inch of two. It wasn't very high since my boss got to me first."

"When your boss told you to stop, did he yell?"

"No."

"Did he speak loudly? Was he audible?"

"It was sort of like a low whisper?"

"Sort of?"

"It was a low whisper."

"When you made that comment about me throwing their families into Guantonamo were the interns facing you?"

"No. "

"Did they respond?"

"No."

"Where were they when you said those comments?"

"They were out of the room."

"How about the idiot from HR?"

"She ran after them."

"Did she see you do anything with the chair?"

"No."

"Did she respond when you made those comments?"

"No."

"Did anyone see you raise the chair?"

"No."

"Did anyone make any comments about what you said about your father being able to put people into detention camps?"

"No."

I could hear the legal wheels turn in my father's head. When I was a child I often spied on him in his favorite chair watching a football game. But I could tell from the look on his eyes that he wasn't focused on the game. He was carefully constructing a legal strategy in his head, putting together moves and countermoves. I always wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he was envisioning himself in court or maybe he was playing hardball in the negotiations over a deal.

"I don't think anything is going to happen to you."

"I practically caused a scene at work. There has to be some type of consequence."

"If there are any actions taking against you , it will probably minor at best. Your grievances were meritorius and you did not engage in any type of unprofessional behavior. You made no remarks about race, religion or their physical looks. You did not act in a fashion that was discriminatory. As for that dumb ass remark about Guantanomo bay and attemtping to brain them with a chair, that could be grounds for dismissal, but it appears your boss was the only witness to that incident and I don't see him bringing that up."

"So what should I do?"

"Just go to work."

"What do you mean just go to work?"

"Just go to work. You're Bill Murray and its Groundhog day. It never happened."

"But what if this keeps blowing up? What if my boss turns against me and the interns and HR heard me?"

"Then you get fired. Once that happens I'll send a crew of my most insane litigators that will start screaming about suing about discriminatory practices, negligence and other some other s**t we will make up. After a week of slamming our d**ks on the table, we will agree to settle out of court in exchange for 6 months of severance and some amazing references."

"Do you think it will work?"

"What did I ever tell you about lawsuits?"

"It is not about winning in court. It's about wearing the other side down."

"Exactly. Once they figure out how utterly deadly my people are in the courtroom, they will realize that giving in to our demands is helluva lot more economical then going toe to toe with us."

"Okay."

The realization that I could be fired was sobering but at least I knew what I was dealing with.

"I can't believe you made that comment about Guantonomo Bay?"

"Why?" Was it that offensive?"

"No. I am just surprised that you ever heard of it."

Leverage

2007-02-11T19:25:00.000-08:00

Its too f**king cold. All I want to do is curl up with a bowl of hot lentil soup anda warm fire. Of course I don’t have a fireplace and I forgot to order Fresh Direct.

Anyways I have a new job now. Same company but a whole new group, it is kind of weird how it went down.

Remember those two glamour asses who almost f**ked me over? Well, I took my father’s advice and created leverage. I began to examine those two girls very closely in trying to figure out who they were and trying find leverage.

There wasn’t really much to find. They were typical Paris Hilton wannabes, poseur types who thought wearing a tie dyed shirt automatically made them Grateful Dead fans. These were girls who followed their fashion tips by watching Extra and worshipped the Bachelor, confusing it with reality. These girls truly felt that because they were at trust fund level, my level, because their daddies could afford to buy them a BMWs, rhinoplasty and shell out a small fortune for college. Because of these privileges, they thought were entitled to everything the world had to offer because they were never refused.

Then it hit me. They were college students, seniors to exact. Wheels began to turn and that is when I began to put together my plan.

I was really nervous as I sat alone with the rest of the unwrapped presents. True to form they were running late, which was fine. It gave me enough time to head off D. I set him off on a Starbucks run on me and to take his time getting back.

When the girls came into the office I made sure that I was sitting across the door so I was the first thing they saw.. When they came into the door they were giggling up a storm. That is when I sprung into action. I asked them to sit down because I needed to talk to them and then I let loose both barrels.

I told them they were pitiful excuses as interns and they should be ashamed of their conduct. Instead of helping me they were hurting not only myself and the entire company. These presents were extremely important because they not only served as goodwill but the represented the company itself to the outside. But as interns all they did was screw around and waste time by needlessly lowering the productivity of the office and inducing a tremendous amount of stress in the workplace including racial discrimination. Then while they were down, I wound up for the kick. I told them it was going to end now and tonight we were going to finish sending out the presents. Even if it meant staying here all night and sleeping in the office.

Then I threw the kick. I told them if they did not comply I would contact their advisors and informing them that they did not fulfill their responsibilities as interns and should receive credit for their time here. I reminded they were probably already on thin ice at Angel Feathers and if they were looking for help they weren’t going to get any.

Before setting up this ambush, I found out from my old boss at Angel Feathersthat all these interns did was waste valuable oxygen. Their performance was no different than what I experienced. In fact my old boss had been demanding that they be let go but Staty Puft didn’t and my boss told me I was free to do what I want with them. As they say in Battlestar Galactica, I was “weapons free”.

You would have thought I had just set fire to their collection of N’Sync albums because they went apesh*t. They started screaming about how they still had Christmas shopping to do and that they still hadn’t gotten ready to pack. Their rage fest went on for 5 minutes while I watched with an amused look on my face.

Then they marched out.. I knew I was going to hit them below the belt since they were seniors and they probably needed the credits to graduate. Doing another semester of interning was definitely going to put a crimp in their graduation plans.

The next thing I knew there was a pow wow with my boss, HR and the two girls. The girls were letting loose the waterworks as they bawled their tears out./ One was complaining how that she needed the cries because she was going a broad to Europe next semesters and the other started to scream that this was going to mess up her law school applications. As if she had a chance.

Stay Puft was really pissed off. Any of her passive aggressive tendencies were burned away with hot rage. She was screaming at me that I had no authority to do what I did. My boss was having a nervous breakdown as he kept repeating that all I had to do was wrap some Christmas presents and instead I end up causing a mutiny.

Then I took out a set of emails. I explained to them that I had asking for help with this situation for quite awhile but I was getting blown off. The emails dictated my conversations with the boss, which was basically to do what I had to get the job done and my emails to HR that were never replied too.

Then Stay Puft demanded how I knew that the two interns were on thin ice? I told her I assumed that due to their horrible work ethic I assumed they sucked ass at everything else they did. Of course I wasn’t going to rat out my former boss.

Finally cooler heads prevailed. The girls stopped crying and the boss and staty puft were vented out. The boss realized there was no one around to help me out and told them that they had to get these presents taken care of today even it meant staying after hours. The girls began to protest but he then told them that it was either this or he was going to make some calls to their advisors.

My boss made the executive decision

“Here’s the deal. You two are going to help PP with the presents even if it means staying around till after hours”

Stay Puft jumped in.

“Excuse me. I am the only one with the authority to do this.”

My boss shot back
“You lost that authority.”
“Excuse me.”

“Did you even respond to any of PP’s emails? Did you even try to help her or talk to the interns?”

“I have been extremely busy. Just like you.”

“So you did get her emails?”
“Yes. But..”

“ But it is your responsibility to put these fires out which you have failed just I have. Right now, I need to get these presents out. If you got a problem with this then talk to G.”

The girls began to whine again.

“Why do we have to do this? Its not our fault this whole thing is screwed up.”
“Why are we doing this

My boss roared back.

“Listen. Obviously your boss didn’t want to deal with you and dropped you off to the nearest sucker, which is me. Here’s the deal wrap all the presents or no credit!”

The girls walked out of the room screaming and cursing away.

“I am not staying one minute in this virgin hellhole.”
“Stupid f**king J*P.”

Suddenly I lost cool and found hot and grabbed a chair, but before I could do anything stupid, the boss held my arms. The girls ran off with Stay puft following them.

I screamed.

“B**ch, what the f**k did you say? Do you even know who the f**k you are dealing with? My Daddy can have you and your family thrown into Guantonomo bay!”

“Just relax. They are not worth it”
My boss said.

At that moment D walked in.

“Something happen? I just saw the wonder twins run screaming out of the building.”

“I just used some leverage.”

D smiled.
“Perhaps we should leverage ourselves in wrapping those presents.”

OMG

2007-02-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

I have just come back from eating all you can eat sushi in the West Village and I have been toilet for like a half hour taking a dump that could fill the east river.

I wasn't in the mood for sushi but it was my goodbye dinner from Section 9 before I started my new job. This has been such a weird month.

The Deafening Silence of Oprah

2007-01-23T20:36:00.000-08:00

This was on TMZ.

Rosie O'Donnell is picking a fight with Oprah over the talk queen's controversial interview with kidnapped teen Shawn Hornbeck. Lots of people are outraged, and many are screaming exploitation. But will O v. Ro turn into another Trump-scale nuclear conflict?

Sources tell TMZ that Oprah's M.O. is always the silent treatment, and that she's not going to get into a Trump-Rosie-style war with O'Donnell. For instance, sources say that Oprah can't stand Dr. Phil McGraw, who she thinks is utterly ungrateful to her. But rather than smack him down publicly, she's dissed privately by not showing up to significant events in his life.

I am a white girl with an enormous trustfund that dwarfs the GNP of most third world countries. But even I am in awe of the power of Oprah.

Babs, if you want to keep the View and your legacy do yourself a favor and take Rosie out fishing on Lake Tahoe and when you come back alone just say there was a boating accident. Trust me. No one will quesiton you.

Ode to Lindsay

2007-01-21T21:54:00.000-08:00

Lindsay Lohan, you’ve been dealt with a bad hand. But it’s all your own making so don’t even try to be faking. So James Franco from Spiderman didn’t want to be your man. It sent you off on a bender, which resulted in drinking enough alcohol for 10 blenders.

So take hold, because you are in control. Mistakes can be undone so that you can enjoy another day in the sun. If you turn into a Factory Girl, it would really make me hurl. Edie Sedgwick was lead to her death by the meth. Even Andy Warhol was appalled that his muse became confused. And chose a path that only led to facing her own wrath.

I’d hate for that to happen to you, especially someone as special as you. Keep your head high and do the rehab stride. 10 years from now when you are holding your Oscar, you will reflect upon those dark days that somehow led you to prosper.

Spouseless

2007-01-17T00:15:00.000-08:00

"Do you want to get married? You like children? You want to have your own children. Every girl wants to have children even lesbians."

"Well hello to you to mom."

Of course it is my mother's way to greet me with questions about my ovarian instincts. It is the way of the Jewish mother to nag their children to the point of their kids wanting to rip their own ears off. Since I have been employed I have been able to shield myself from any attacks from but this time her tone of voice had a bit more of panic to it than normal.

"Did you get my email? Did you read the article?"

"Yes. I did."

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"Right now. Nothing."

This was the wrong answer. For it set off a tirade.

"Sweetie, you need to get serious about. You need to start thinking about your future."

"I have plenty of time."

"PP, time moves very fast. One day your out at frathouse having a kegger, then the next you know you your celebrating your 35th birthday with a 100 housecats."

"Mom. Your being irrational."

"No. I'm being realistic. Here's the bitter truth. Being single is horrible. You need to get married so that you have somone to share the burden of life."

"Oh that is really comforting. Dad can tell you that married couples are some of the most miserable people in the world."

"Which just proves my point. They at least have somone to be miserable with."

"Ugh."

"Did you know that your grandmother considering putting a marriage clause in your trustfund?"

"What?"

"She was thinking of putting in a clause that only you more access to your fund if you got married. But she decided against it. She felt that it would be unfair to interfere with your life in that fashion and you be resentful if you felt you were forced into making such an important decision. All that mattered to her was that you married somone who loved and respected you."

"That was very sweet of her."

"Yes. I know. So what's taking you so long?"

"Mom."

"PP, my worst fear is to be on my death bed knowing that you are living alone in the world. Don't let me die like that."

"Mom, stop being dramatic. You're not going to die."

"I am eventually. And I would like to know before I take my last breath that I haven't raised a spinster."

"Well I have sometime before that happens."

"Oh my god. That is so inconsiderate."

"What?"

"Your going to wait till I am on my death bed to get married? That is unbelieveable."

"Mom. That's not what I meant. Jesus."

"PP, I have known many a socialite and debutante with money to burn and looks to match. The smart ones usually get married. Sometimes they get divorced, some stay together in loveless marriages and others get lucky and live happily ever after. But I have seen others who decide to stay on the field even when their game is over and another team is coming onto the field. I knew this one girl who practically lived in Studio 54. During the 80's she went off LA to try to become an actress/singer/model. Then she went off to India to join an ashram. I ran into her recently she is now a teacher at a yoga studio. We caught up. She went through some relationships but never got married. She talked about these amazing experiences she had. I was really in awe of she did. But then I realized something. All she had were memories. I mean, I will never do even half of what she does and I respect her decisions but all she has left are stories and what is the point of having stories when you have no one to tell them to."

"So what do you have to show for your life?"

"Two beautiful children."

"So it is all about procreation."

"Well its more than just extending the survial of my DNA, it is know that your father and I created with our love something special with the two of you."

"Aww that's sweet."

"So have you tried speed dating? That's an event I know of a synagogue that has a lot of cute Jewish doctors. If you don't hurry up they will all be taken."

"Well according to this article they are going to remain single for awhile."

"Just think about it. The last thing you want to happen is realize your 50 years old and you want a kid and you pull a Madonna and start kidnapping every third world child you find."

"Just email me the link."

I think my mother does have a point. I don't want to be an old maid. I mean these statistics are pretty f**ked up.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

Several factors are driving the statistical shift. At one end of the age spectrum, women are marrying later or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods. At the other end, women are living longer as widows and, after a divorce, are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom.

In addition, marriage rates among black women remain low. Only about 30 percent of black women are living with a spouse, according to the Census Bureau, compared with about 49 percent of Hispanic women, 55 percent of non-Hispanic white women and more than 60 percent of Asian women.

I mean there is two ways to look at this. Being single is the new normal for women. women are more comfortable not being members of the institution of marriage. In fact they don't need to be married to be happy. The other perspective is this all just a facade by women who are facing the reality that they will be alone for the rest of their lives. So they put on a shiny face and proudly show their singlehood as a badge of honor. There's nothing wrong with that. However women shouldn't confuse acceptance as happiness. Accepting a situation that you can't change is simply adapting to it. You are no longer in conflict with it because you are not confronting it. But it doesn't mean you are happy. you are just resigned to this dynamic.

But marriage is really complicated. It is not just about love but it is also about asking the right questions and see if you and your spouse are on the same page. Because nothing sucks more than being in a committment and realizing the person you are comitted is reading a differnt book. That's how I lost him.

Fighting the dragon

2007-01-15T10:11:00.000-08:00

This field of golden wheat shimmered in the light of the sun which warmed my face. A cool light wind blew across the field which made roll like waves on a beach. Then it got weird.

I was standing in the field when a red two headed dragon came into the sky. It made a horrible screech that pierced the air and brought forth mass of dark clouds then it began to shoot flames out of its mouths destroying the fields and any memory of a beautiful day.

I felt scared helpless. Then I got very, very angry. It was then I saw a sword and a shield on the ground and I grabbed both of them and began to run toward the two headed dragon. The dragon began shoot flames down on me but I blocked it with my shield. I could feel the heat all over my body but the fear of being burnt alive was crushed by this one powerful thought. "You're going down."

With a mighty yell, I sprung up into the air and landed on the chest of the dragon and proceeded to slash and cut away. The dragon roared with anger but I would not stop. Then the dragon smacked away my shield and was about to set me aflame when I took my sword with both hand and with a downward motion and I plunged it all the way in its chest.

There was a bright flash and then a deafening explosion. I found myself sailing in the air. Then I was laying in the grass watching the two headed dragon stumble violently to its death. A smile curled in my lips.

Then I woke up. I was a little confused. I mean I never had a dream where I dress up as Joan of Arc. My dreams usually involve manolo blahniks and Ben and Jerry's. I had just talked to my Dad about what was going on at work. Was the dragon the two glamour asses from work? If that was the case what did the sword and shield represent? This is what happens when you work with people who's sole occupation is playing Dungeons and Dragons.

But then it became clear. I had to fight. No matter how scared I was of these girls, I had to take a stand.

Laying the hammer down

2007-01-14T15:51:00.000-08:00

The office is still reverberating from what I pulled off with the Christmas presents but as far as I am concerned, I had no choice and I got the job done. Here's how it went down.

My teeth began to grind whenever I heard the voices of these two glamour asses. It was only several days before Christmas and only half of the presents were ready to be shipped off.

But these two Olsen twin wannabees from Long Island were completely useless as they spent most of their time web surfing and taking twenty minute smoking breaks. Even though they threw in another intern for me, these two b****es were completely f**king up the program.

They would show up late for work and then spend most of the time f**king around on the computer. Then they would bitch and moan about why they were doing this and that they should going back to Long Island to help with Christmas with their families. Then spend their time talking about Laguna Beach and the clubs in the meat market. When they weren't working they would be out flirting with the rest of Section 9. It would take me twenty minutes to track them and when I would find them they would be surrounded by a bunch of geeks giggling away as they sipped their cappucinos.

Then my boss who was of no help since was he undergoing 5 mental breakdowns a day and every email I sent him was replied with "Just get it done." The only time he ever talked to me was to yell at me to keep the glamour asses in check since they were disrupting the productiivty. I was at my wits end when I called and left voicemails and emailed HR but I never got a response. It wouldn't surprise me if she was screening my calls after our last meeting.

But apparently she was listening since D the intern jumped into the scene. He was a Chinese kid from Baruch on the chunky side. I was hoping they would become motivated when they saw him action. He was f**king machine as he began wrapping and slapping tape on the presents.

I came inches away from stabbing them with a pair of safety scissors when I sent them off to get more wrapping apper and they didin't return till the end of the day with a completely fabricated story about that they were running all over the city looking for wrapping paper.

It got worse for D since these girls went into full Lindsay Lohan mode as they began make catty comments why he wasn't in Harvard if he was so smart and why was he such a kiss ass. And when the whole Rosie O'Donnell broke out, they cculdn't making comments about the connection between Chunky's ethnicity and Rosie's grasp of the Mandarin language . At one point they asked him if he was related to Connie Chung because of his last name.

He tried to laugh it off but I could see from the slight twist in his face that he was angry and he just wish they would stop. I would try to jump in and chill them out but they would use the excuse of "Oh it's just a joke." or "The constitution protects us to say whatever we want."

I felt powerless and impotent. I was at the mercy of these b**ches who thought they were hot s**t because they went to Gallatin and they both drove SAABs. I could get a fleet of SAABS with a snap of my fingers. They think they are rich because their parents own a used car dealship and a 5 Dunkin Doughnut franchises. That's not rich. I'm rich. They are just B&T.

But I don't say s**t. I am too scared. If I piss them off they will take off and screw me over and I am left to deal with this situation.

That night I called my Dad for help. If there is was anyone that could tell me how to get control of the situation it was him.

After presenting him with the situation he went lawyer on me and with a stoic tone began to put the whole thing together.

"Your objective is to wrap up and send out those presents?"

"Yes." I said as I curled up in my bed.

"And these two girls are supposed to help you?"

"Yes."

"And they are not only preventing you from doing your job but they are also creating a hostile enviornment for one of the interns that could potentially result in a lawsuit?"

"Yes."

"Besides telling you to get the job done your boss has been unable to assist you in the matter?"

"Yes."

"And HR has also been equally unhelpful."

"Dad, is there a point to this?"

"Just bear with me. So basically you are the one in charge?"

"Yes."

"Then this is a simple matter of leverage. You are the authority which means you have leverage over everyone."

"Leverage? What leverage? I can't even get two interns to follow my orders."

"Then you have to create it."

"How the hell do I do that?"

"Do I have to do everything for you?"

"Dad, please. I really need your help."

"Okay. Do you know why I am such a successful lawyer?"

"Why?"

"Because I have a high rate of settling cases before they even go to court. Clients love that because going to court sucks. When you go to litigation you failed in your job as a lawyer. When you go to litigation you are putting the welfare of your client in the hands of a judge or jury. And the key to success is all about leverage. I learned early on that leverage is all about wants and needs. Whenever I face another lawyer my objective is to figure out what their client wants and needs are. Once I figure that out I will determine how to take control of their wants and needs and then I get to call the shots. If you want to break in those wannabe Paris Hiltons in then you have to determine their wants and needs."

"So how does this apply to my situation."

"Figure it out."

Then he hung up.

Oh no, OC

2007-01-04T21:10:00.000-08:00

The OC has been cancelled. And what have we learned kids? NEVER KILL THE PRETTY GIRL AND LEAVE THE UGLY GIRL BEHIND TO TAKE HER PLACE! AND THREE UGLY GIRLS CAN NEVER TAKE THE PLACE OF ONE HOT GIRL!

Seriously, the show jumped the shark awhile ago. I eman there is onyl so many times you can have end the season with somone dying or leaving the OC only to come back next season.

Happy New Year

2006-12-31T19:32:00.000-08:00

I am spending New Year’s Eve on the Upper West Side. Not at chic bar or restaurant but in an apartment. My parent’s apartment, alone.

There. I said it. Except for the television and the web, I will by myself. My parents aren’t going to be around since they will be partying with friends. Knowing that my parents have a better social life than me is kind of depressing.

Why? Lack for friends, I'm ugly, I smell. Take your pick. In all honesty it is due to lack of effort.

In all honesty I have been dreading this day. When the clock hits midnight the couples will in each other’s arms kissing an dancing while I will be watching the ball drop alone on my couch with leftover Chinese food. But I am coming to terms to my status for tonight’s events. In fact it is an appropriate way to end such a sh***y year. However I am going to be discrete. Which leads to New Year’s Eve alone protocol.

When you are spending New Year’s Eve alone there are certain strategies you need to implement.

First of all do not spend it at home. Coming back from a New Year’s Eve party is symbolic. You have just said goodbye to the past and you are embracing a new year. Part of the process is coming home from a party or a weekend or whatever. You just want a feeling of having done something. This is why people go to Times Square and freeze to death.

Also if you live in a building that has a doorman like I do, you don’t want to advertise that that you are a loser with no social life.

Rich single people usually leave town, go the left coast or Europe, Asia, a cruise something. So that when someone asks what they did for New Year’s, they just say they went away. And that pretty much fills up the gaps.

Now I decided to keep my plans low key since it was too late to book flights to St. Maarten. I opted for the family route, which is staying at my family’s co-op. All I have to sayt is I spent it with family and friends which is true but since I am at my parents apartment and they are spending New Year’s with the friends. Okay. It’s a stretch but as far as I am concerned it works.

The problem with spending New Year’s Eve at your parent’s home is that you might run into people you know. This happened to a friend of my sister’s from college. His New Year’s eve plans went straight to hell when he broke up with his girlfriend and was in no mood to spend New Year’s Eve with anyone so he decided to spent it alone at his parent’s house playing Xbox and watching porn.

At one point during his marathon of Jenna Jameson threesomes and killing zombies he got a hankering for burgers and fries and went out to pick up his food. At that same exact diner he ran into several of his former high school classmates. I forgot to mention it had been a year since he graduated and was still unemployed and his classmates at that time were rolling along with their lives with jobs or engagements. It was a rather awkward situation. Which leads to my next rule.

Buy all of your New Year’s Eve supplies before hand preferably two days before. But if you have to do it last minute fine, but the cutoff is at 3pm. After that, you lock yourself up till the New Year. If you go out by yourself after chances are people will notice that you are someone with no place to go and no one to go with.

For example, if you are dressed up in a D& G black cocktail dress and are at line at Whole Foods it means that you are either prepping for a party or grabbing some food to eat. Now if it is 6pm and you are wearing jeans and a windbreaker and getting a bottle of stoli it is obvious someone is alone tonight.

That is why I bought all my party goods before 2pm and locked myself up in my parents apartment. I even bought my dinner of Chinese takeout at lunchtime. I chose 2pm to come in because at 2:30 the shift changes so the new doorman on duty won’t know that I am in the apartment all alone.

I think you should be as dry as possible when you are alone celebrating New Year’s. It is depressing enough as it is when you drink alone but on New Year’s eve? After the first glass you will want to shove your face into the garbage disposal. If you want to drink, then let it be half a beer or a very light alcoholic beverage. Just enough to take off the edge off. The last thing you want to do is be involved in an incident of drunk dialing where you are calling everyone of your ex-boyfriend demanding why they broke up with you.

As soon as the clock strikes midnight turn off the tv. Cleanup and go to bed. Treat it as another night.

Done and Done

2006-12-21T09:34:00.000-08:00

I maybe out of a job. But I don't care. I sent out all of the Christmas gifts and in the process managed to crush the hopes and dreams of two intern whores and protected an innocent kid from their clutches. If I get fired for that, fine. Fair trade as far as I am concerned.

I'll talk about this more later, in the meantime I am looking forward to get my drink on.

OMFUG

2006-12-17T22:56:00.000-08:00

I have until Tuesday to finish sending out these presents. I think I will murder the two interns before that. Bad news. They gave me more presents to wrap. Good news, they gave me another intern. He's a bit porky. But he is nice and dependable.

Slitting my wrists.

2006-12-13T23:13:00.000-08:00

As if my life isn't complicated enough they have given me two interns who are completely useless. I mean I have to repeat my self ten times. How hard is to to set up a bunch of priority mail boxes? To make things worse they come straight from Angelfeathers, my old group and the first they said to me was "Aren't you the girl who got fired?"
These two glamour asses think they are so hot cause they go to Gallatin and constantly drop the Olsen twins and act like they are their BFFs when in fact they only shared one class with them. What the f**k is worng with these kids? Do you think you are entitled to a be f**king moron just because Britney Spears forgot to wear underwear?

And it is a sad state of affairs if you don't know how to use a pair of scissors properly. I don't know how many rolls of wrapping paper that have been destroyed because these stupid whore riders don't know how to tape properly.

What is really annoying is that the packing is delayed because my boss hasn't signed his Christmas cards. Yeah, I said it. Christmas cards. Not Channukah cards or holiday cards. No. I am not going to sue anyone.

Every time I leave the room I have to do an inventory of the presents so they don't walk off. I also have to make sure that if I leave the room, it has to be clear of anyone and the door has to be locked. That means if I have to go to the ladies room I have to kick the interns out and when I come back I have to gather them up which is a pain in the ass because they are usally nowhere to be found. Ever since that stupid f**king temp tried to boost the DVD players, the boss has become ultra paranoid.

Even when I do hunt them down and drag their carcasses back back they end up surfing the web in the room. I am going to kill somone.

Christmas Gift Detail

2006-12-11T08:05:00.000-08:00

Last night I got a call from the Trainer while catching up on episodes of the OC.

"PP. We have a major problem."

"What's going on?"

"We almost got completely f**ked over by one our temps."

I don't know why he said one of our temps since there is only one temp I know of who works in our office. He is a thin scraggy burnout who got hired two weeks ago to wrap up Christmas gifts for clients. But he seemed more inclined to hit on the girls and scrounge for swag.

"What happened?"

"The f**ktard has been selling the gifts on eBay."

Trainer explained that the boss was doing a search on eBay for DVD players. He bought a bulk order of DVD players to be sent as gifts to clients. Out of curiosity he went onto to eBay to see if he could get a better deal. He came upon one seller who was selling the exact type of DVD player that he had purchased. He did a little more research and realized the seller was the temp. He immediately went back to the office to do a quick inventory when he ran into the temp packing up the dvd players onto to a cart.

The boss asked him what he was doing. The temp said he was getting an early start in sending out the gifts. The boss pointed out the boxes weren't even wrapped and besides he hadn't even writing out the gift cards for the temp. The temp yammered out some excause about doing it at the post office. The boss pointed out it was Sunday. The temp tried to bulls**t his way by saying that he was going to the 24 hour one. It got really tense when a girl, presumbably his girlfriend, entered the office and blurted out to the temp that Big Joey, (These are the trainer;s exact words) was getting impatient and wanted to know when the DVD players were arriving.

The boss went ballistic, fired the temp and told them to get out before he called the cops. Even while being kicked out, the temp portested and tried to make sure he was going to get paid for his work or lack therof.

The boss did an inventory of the DVD players and to his relief they were all there. But they still needed to get wrapped.

"Which is where you come in PP. We need you to wrap up the Christmas gifts."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I'm Jewish."

"Jesus f**king Christ! Half of the staff celebrate Passover including out boss! And these aren't Christmas gifts, they are holiday gifts."

"Why doesn't he just hire another temp?"

"Don't you think I suggested that? Boss says there is no time to find someone qualified for the job and besides, he is so f**king paranoid about the gifts dissappearing that he wants somone in -house to take care of it. Do you know he changed all the locks after that douchebag left? Now we have to get everyone new keys."

"Dude, I have like 3 market reports deadline reports to meet. I am in the middle of writing a scathing review of last weekend's Galactica which was really crappy as far as I was concerned."

"I talked to Otaku. He agreed to pick up the slack for you."

"Trainer, I ahte doing s**t. It is so tedious and time consuming."

"Listen, if you can't do it, then I have to do it."

"Wait a minute? The boss gave you this job?"

"He gave it to me delegate."

"Oh bullsh*t!"

"PP. For f**k's sake, just help me out here. My schedule is already packed enough as it is. Please. I will make it up to you."

I don't know why. But I gave in and agreed. So today I will be stuck in a room preparing gifts to be sent out at the end of thsi week. This is going to really suck.

Waiting

2006-12-07T22:51:00.000-08:00

This year needs to be over soon.

Britney Spears C section scar NSFW

2006-11-28T22:30:00.000-08:00

I saw pictures of this before but they didn't show very much. But then this was sent around the office.

Yikes. I guess that was one way to avoid cooter slack. Obviously she should know better and should wear some underwear. Afterall she is a public figure. But then again, if you look at the angles of some of these photos it is obvious that those paparazzis were being a litte too aggressive. My media studies professor would have had a field day with this.

It is nice to know Britney has a red birthmark on her left ass cheek.

Thanksgiving overload

2006-11-26T23:47:00.000-08:00

Well, I am happy to say that Thanksgiving was stress free unlike the past two. Then again it helps to have it someone else's house. It is so much more enjoyable when your not playing host and turkey killer at the same time.

My social calendar is starting to open up considerably. I got invited to two parties in Williamsburg. I am not sure if I want to go. They both take place on a Saturday. And we all know Saturdays are so ovah.

“In the old days, Saturday was the destination night for chic New Yorkers headed to Studio 54 at its most resplendent,” Mr. Musto said in an e-mail message. “But things changed as more and more tri-staters were willing to use the bridges and tunnels for here-we-come Gotham weekends, so the locals started staying home and triple-bolting their doors as if in a George Romero film.”

Well in that case the solution is simple. We have to blow up these f**king bridges and flood the tunnels.

Judith Regan

2006-11-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

I overheard this conversation between Goat and Trainer over this whole OJ interview and book deal. It was a subject that I was hoping to avoid the topic since I think he is a disgusting piece of human refuse and simply talking about him just gives him what he wants which is attention.

Goat
“Thank God Rupert Murdoch had the sense to shut down Operation OJ. Finally we are done with that a**hole.”

Trainer

“Dude we are never going to be done with him. He will always be part of the pop culture lexicon.”

Goat
“You know what pisses me off? It’s Judith Regan. I mean she’s passing herself off as some type of saint who was abused by men. In fact she’s just a money grubbing parasite.

“So are you saying that she’s lying?”

“No, I just saying she’s being exploitive.”

“Do you think Tom Cruise is being exploitive?”

“What is this have to do with Judith Regan?”

“Nothing, but I just want to know that if he’s being exploitive?”

“No.”

“So you don’t think the wedding in Italy, inviting Brooke Shields who he insulted on the Today show and running around with his baby and Katie Holmes to every camera is simply an effort to rehabilitate his image?”

“Of course not. Its obviously a PR stunt on his part.”

“So don’t you think Judith Regan is doing the same thing?”

“What the f**k are you talking about? OJ is a murderer, Tom Cruise is a just a douchebag.”

“No argument there, but they are both similar in the sense they are trying to make a name for themselves. Judith Regan recently moved to LA. She was a big shot in NYC but in LA she is just a newcomer, there fore she needs to make a big splash even if it is a splash in toxic waste. Tom Cruise is in house of horses**t since being booted from Paramount and ragging on the chick from the Blue Lagoon. They are both in the same mission, no pun intended, which is to stay relevant. But I think Judith is getting the s**t end of the stick.”

“Why are you defending her?”

“I am not defending her, I am just pointing out the fact they are both in the same position however if Tom was a woman and Judith was a man, I doubt Tom would survive the media onslaught and if Judith Regan was a man she would be getting high fives for landing the deal of the century.”

“So you don’t find her despicable?”

“Of course I find some of her actions despicable. Its funny when it was discovered that she was having an affair with Beranard Kerik I was more pissed off over that fact that she was having the affair in an apartment meant for 9/11 workers over looking Ground Zero rather than her having an affair with a married man. I mean Jesus, they have enough money, rent a hotel. But to simply single her out for being a exploitive is hypocritical since the core aspect of media is to exploit. Others may call it just presenting the information but there is always a degree of exploitation involved. All Judith is doing is playing by the rules.”

“So this is all ends justifies the means.”

“Here’s a true story, when Judith first started out in publishing, there was an executive who sexually harassed her on a daily basis. Judith realized that it was all going to be a he said she said if she reported him and he had more power she did so she simply smiled it off and went about her day. One day this executive became so bold that he manually deposited his DNA on a statue in her office. Still Judith smiled it off.”

“That is nasty.”

One day Rupert Murdoch gave her the deal of the lifetime but she had to leave Simon unencumbered. When the powers that be became resistant on her departure she informed them that she was working in an unsafe environment caused by this executive. The executive of coursed denied this, Judith responded by informing them she still had the statue that he splooged on in cold storage wrapped in saran wrap and was more than happy to bring it to court and she was more than willing to cover the cost for the DNA tests. This was all before Monica Lewinsky.

“That is really heinous.”

“Exactly, but that’s how far you have to go if want you are going to build multi million dollar company and raise two kids at the same while fighting of a legion of divorce lawyers. You have to be willing to punch below the belt because there are ten other guys who are going to be doing the same thing. And they will shed no tears for you. And if you are a woman you have to work harder to be better because you will be automatically labeled as weak. It's do or die. That is why the actions she takes seem so reprehensible to the rest of the world because we don't understand her motivations or what she has gone through."

I zoned out after that.

Courting Couture Passes the Bar

2006-11-15T22:47:00.000-08:00

My home girl Jessica passed the bar! Now hurry up and slap on those Ally McBeal mini skirts and start racking enormous amounts of billable hours.

Beyonce and Eva sitting in a tree.

2006-11-13T22:34:00.001-08:00

I don't even know why they are even bothering with the movie.

Beyoncé's role reversal
BY MICHELLE CARUSO
DAILY NEWS WEST COAST BUREAU CHIEF
Saturday, November 11th, 2006

LOS ANGELES - Booty fruity! R&B goddess Beyoncé Knowles and sultry "Desperate Housewives" star Eva Longoria are set to lock lips and hips in a big-screen lesbian love story.
The gorgeous pair are in talks to make "Tipping the Velvet," based on Sarah Waters' graphically saucy Victorian tale of a love affair between an 1890s dance hall star and an oyster-shucking fishmonger's daughter.

"We've had 'Brokeback Mountain,' so the time is right for this divine novel to get the same treatment," the 25-year-old Knowles said at a New York benefit for ovarian cancer.
The sexy Longoria, 31, is also enthusiastic about the Sofia Coppola-helmed project.

"Yes, it's true. We are talking about doing the movie together," she said. "It's such a wonderful novel, a beautiful love story."

Coppola, who directed the edgy "Virgin Suicides" and the Oscar-winning "Lost in Translation," hopes to get the green light to make the groundbreaking feature about hot lady love.

Knowles, currently starring in "Dream Girls," would be tapped for the role of Kitty Butler, a male impersonator at the local music hall, while Longoria, would likely play Nancy Astley, the brine-soaked oyster girl who becomes Kitty's lesbian lover and later dabbles in prostitution.

The book's title is a Victorian sex euphemism. A BBC-TV version four years ago caused outrage in Britain due to graphic love scenes that included sex toys.

A Destiny's child and a Depeserate Housewife dropping gorditias? All I know is that when this movie comes out I am not even going step one foot into a theater because I know every surface will be sticky and it is not because of the candy.

They can argue all they want how this is art and that they are doing their own Brokeback, but all it is is an opportunity for millions of red blooded hetrosexual males to engage in manual spermicide. Why? Because this is what straight guys talk about, dream about, get wet dreams about. This is why the adult video industry exists. It has all the elements of porn which are lesbian trysts, sex toys and call girls.

Yes. I know Beyonce and Eva won't be bumping uglies but it doesn't matter. Once their hot naked bodies began writhe together covered in the sweat of sapphic love, try to convince anyone it doesn't look real.

What makes me upset about this whole thing is that it feels so exploitive of women. I know some will argue that a woman has a right to her own sexuality and to make her own choices in her sex life. And I am all for that. But this seems more of an opportunity for Hollywood to fill as many seats as possible even if it means spending a fortune on paper towels, ERA and dry cleaning for movie seats.

But by placing it in same ranks as Brokeback Mountain is just jumping on its coattails. If Hollywood was really progressive, why not have Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen Degeneres be cast in this movie? Because those girls are real pickers of ruby fruit.

Why bother?

2006-11-08T11:10:00.000-08:00

I saw this in the NYT

Woman in 'Shakira Shaking' Contest Sues

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 7, 2006
Filed at 5:10 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- A woman who said she fell off a slippery bar and injured herself while dancing in a ''Shake-It-Like-Shakira'' contest is suing the Manhattan saloon that sponsored the competition.

Megan Zacher, 22, of Delanco, N.J., fell at Calico Jack's Cantina on 42nd Street and Second Avenue on July 8, 2006, her lawyer, Lawrence Simon, said Tuesday. He said the fall caused a torn knee ligament that required surgery.

Simon said Zacher and two friends were celebrating a birthday. She had been at the crowded establishment about an hour, was working on her second drink and was dancing on the bar, vying for the $250 ''Shake-It-Like-Shakira'' prize, when she fell, Simon said.

Shakira, pop songstress originally from Colombia, who also has Lebanese ancestry, is famous for her eye-catching belly dance moves in her videos and in-person appearances. Her latest hit is ''Hips Don't Lie.''

Simon said there were about 10 other women on the bar. Her friends, schoolmates from Staten Island's Wagner College, did not take part in the jiggle competition, which required a $35 entry fee, Simon said.

Zacher's lawsuit, filed Monday in Manhattan's State Supreme Court, says the bar's operators should have known the contest was ''dangerous and likely to lead to injury.''

Calico Jack's was ''negligent, reckless and careless'' in ''permitting the bar area to become and remain wet and otherwise in an unsafe condition, and by failing to warn customers of the hazards presented,'' court papers say.

The lawsuit asks unspecified damages from Calico Jack's. A man at Calico Jack's who identified himself as the manager, who identified himself as ''Tom'' but refused to give his last name, said he had no comment.

I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't say this but I find this really funny. If you are going to get drunk and shake it like Shakira at a place called Calico Jack's, then you might as go to your local hooters and save yourself the trip. This story reminds me of tourists who go France but instead of indulging in the local cuisine they head to McDonald's.

I mean why bother coming to Manhattan if you are just going to engage in wacky hijinks that is more at place at a junior high rec night? It is so B&T.

FREE AT LAST! FREE AT LAST! GOD ALMIGHTY SHE IS FREE AT LAST!

2006-11-07T22:21:00.000-08:00

As if we didn't see this coming.

TMZ is reporting that Britney has finally pulled the plug on her leechy husband, citing irreconcilable diffs and asking for full legal and physical custody of Sean Preston and Jaeden Blu or whatever. "Sources tell TMZ there was no single reason for Britney pulling the plug, rather, it was 'a string of events.'

My mom used to have a name for these types of guys. Kept men. She came up with that term after vacationing in Monte Carlo. They were armies of well tanned, athelic men dressed in the finest clothes this side Armani. But heroin junkies, they were always on the lookout for their next fix which was a middle age woman made single by widowhood or divorce. They latch onto them in order for those women to support them.

Mom actually had a conversation with one kept guy who confessed to her that there was only one rule that a good kept man has to follow in order for the party to keep on going. Don't f**K with the gravy train.

Kevin, is an example of f**king your own gravy train. And it is obvious that it was huge ego that did him in. Because he had bedded, married and impregnated Britney he was under the impression that he was the equal of Britney. When in reality he was the f**king sperm donor.

All he had to do was take care of business which was to service Britney's need. Be a good dad and not smoke pot in front of the kids.

But no. He thought by breeding with Spears that somehow her juicy musical goodness would somehow be absorbed in his bloodstream like a virus. He thought he was a star when in reality he was just an asteroid.

So what is going to happen now?

I predict that this f**ktard has only begun to travel into a serious world of hurt. I think and his other babymamas are going to be on a warpath. Now that he is no longer has lips on the Spears Teet, they have to go in suck him dry before he blows the rest of his money.

KFed has already embarked on a future of laughbale attempts to be taken seriously. I mean when he showed up on Monday Night Raw just after his dynamic debut on the Kids Choice awards, you know the next stop for the KFed train is Knottsberry Farms.

If Kfed wants to survive he has to jump on the reality show bandwagon. Don't be surprised to see him on the The Surreal Life. I wouldn't put it past him for him to gain 200 pounds in order to get on Celebrity Fit Club.

Oh KEd. If only you had followed Augilera's husband cue and just stay in the background as a music producer.

More Halloween pictures

2006-11-06T16:26:00.000-08:00

We're cute, We're thin, get used to it!

These were a bunch of Japanese tourists at the parade. I thought they were adorable even though their only objective is to steal all the white men in Manhattan.

Kidding! Not.

Little edgy today. We are starting our move to our new space. The irony is that it isn't a new space at all. It's back at the office where I was fired.

Happy Halloween!

2006-11-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

Stop looking at our baseballs. Or we will get our hands on your bats.

Just among some of the pictures from the Halloween Parade. I will write more later one but the OC is on.

Half a century of tv

2006-10-31T16:29:00.000-08:00

I haven't watched the show in years but I am sad that Bob Barker is retiring. What a way to end Halloween.

Halloween

2006-10-30T08:35:00.000-08:00

I need to get a costume for the Halloween but I have no idea what to wear. Last time I was a cop. Any suggestions? It has to be flashy since I am going to the Halloween parade that runs up 6th ave. It's sort of a requirement for the office.

Standstill

2006-10-23T20:24:00.000-07:00

wow ur blog sux ass. you went from having a huge readership to having none! what happened? why the fall?

What happened? Your parents walked into your room while masturbating to their sex tape they made last week. Listen up you hermaphroditic wonder, I could care less that less people are reading my blog. The fact that over weight girls who should spend time more time investigating their options in gastric bypass rather than learning how to be strippers and hipster wannabes who have nothing better to do than snipe at their betters while they live in the basement of their grandparents’ house playing warcraft.

I am so f**king relieved that every time I open up my email that I don’t have a bunch of comments from people who feel they need to pass judgement in order to feel better about themselves. Not that I don’t mind putting people in their respective place but it does get annoying knocking the snot out of the proletariat all the time.
The only reason why I started this blog was to write about what’s going in my life. It was never about getting readers or a book deal. It was all about me and what I had to say. If I managed to get a couple of fans who wouldn’t annoy me then that was cool.

It’s weird. Looking over my blog I realize that my life is always out of whack. It’s never in whack. When I first started this blog I was going drinking every night, hitting the clubs with the claque but my family was always on my case because I didn’t have a job and was playing the trust fund baby.

Then I start to get work but my social completely tanks when VD and the rest of the claque ditch me. I just wish my life was in whack. I wish everything was in balance.
Work is getting a little tense. G announced at the last meeting that he is going to merge all of the groups onto one floor. It is just a matter of figuring out who is getting booted. My boss is confident that Tiberius group will be untouched because Battlestar Galactica has been bringing in huge numbers. We'll see what ahppens. All I know is that I sacrificed Project Runway for this job.

LET'S GO METS!

2006-10-19T23:26:00.000-07:00

IT'S BEEN 20 YEARS. YOU ARE DUE FOR ANOTHER SERIES. HURRY IT UP!

Ewwww to whoa

2006-10-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

This picture was being passed around the office. Not for the faint of heart.

It is from this site.

When I first saw this picture I was really grossed out. I mean its a bunch of Japanese school girls slicing themselves up with Samurai swords. I mean what the f**k? Its really disgusting, I mean their intestines are hanging out.

Then Goat, our office Otaku, put the whole thing perspective.

"You noticed that these girls are committing suicide. In Japan ritual suicide has been part of the culture for hundreds of years. Part of that influence is because it is an island. That has shaped the mentality of the Japanese because it has created this all or nothing character."

"I still don't get it." I said.

"Ok. During World War II, Japan was a powerhouse, this little island was making mince meat of every country in Asia. Part of it is their complex. They are overcompensating for their lack of stature. That is why they were so aggressive during WWII."

"And also because they have small d**ks?"

"Be nice. But I guess you could argue Freud on this one."

"What is the deal with school girls?"

"Well, there are many intepretations. If you look at the expressions on these girls faces they are not in any pain. In fact they seem to be enjoying themselves."

"Well what is creepy is that they seem to be, I don't know, turned on."

"Ah hah. You are starting to think now. There are definitely sexual connotations to this piece. One could argue Freud and that state that the sword represents the phallic symbol. You could argue that the act of disembowling themselves serves as the act of them losing their innocence. Now is there something else you can pick up?"

"Well, there is one girl standing in the picture but she has done anything to herself."

"Ah, very good. Now take a look at her sword grip and then take a look at the others. DO you notice anything odd?"

"Well, they are holding it seems to be different than the others."

"Wow, your really catching on. If you look at everyone else's sword grip, they are holding the sword in order to inflict a fatal wound upon themselves. Now the girl in the center is holding the sword in a pose where it is not in the position of a self inflicted wound. In fact she looks as if she about to strike someone with it. Do anything else different about her?"

"Her hair. It looks blonder than the others."

"There you go. She stands out not just from the way she holds her sword but also her hair. Did you read that article on Japanese woman moving to New York?

"No."

"If you read that article, you will understand the meaning of this picture."

"Could you just tell me."

"Fine. The NYT article was about Japanese women moving to Manhattan in order to be more free and get away from their repressive society. In Manhattan they explore new things like hip hop, American culture and dating out of their race. This picture is a very graphic depiction of Japanese women rebelling. These are all school girls which represent the group mentality of Japanese women. The samurai swords and the self inflicted cuts represent duty. Japan is huge on duty. To not abide by your duty is an act of great dishonor and there fore you must fulfill your duty even at the cost of your own life. Now the girl in the middle represents the Japanese woman rebelling from her duties. Her non-conformity is represented by the fact that she is the only one standing, the only one with blonde highlights in her hair and the fact that she holds her sword in a position to strike somone other than herself. Do you get it now?"

"Yeah. I see your point. But I still think it is a gross picture.

Galactica Overload

2006-10-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

I have been a bad little princess with my lack of entries. But I have a really good excuse. I have been deluged with Galactica coverage. I have been reading Galactica comic books, magazines, I have even watched all of the past seasons to prepare for this new season.

I miss fashion.

He's either really rich or she's really blind

2006-10-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

Ewwwwww! This guy is like a 100 years old and has the mouth of a T-Rex. Is he afraid that the spinach will run away from him? And his pre-fetus girlfriend looks like she is about to get her arm torn off. Was being his stable hand part of the job description I wonder what her parents think? I guess they are relieved that she is with a guy considering she went to Smith.

What's up with these Asian girls hooking up with geriatric white guys? Was there a plague that killed all the Asian men? Or Asian women still equate white guys with being well endowed?

Updates, updates

2006-09-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

Yes. I'm alive. It has been a very busy week. No. I have not been laid off but there has been a massive amount of reshuffling going on at work. Bad news is that I have more work to do, good news is that it is slowly verring me away from the sci-fi comic book crap.

More details coming.

Going to see the Preacher

2006-09-14T00:16:00.000-07:00

On the next day, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14th, we welcome one of the most acclaimed artists of our time, co-creator of V FOR VENDETTA, DAVID LLOYD. Joining Lloyd will be his co-creator on WAR STORIES, the co-creator of PREACHER and THE BOYS, GARTH ENNIS. This is a special event and it begins at 5:00 and ends at 7:00 PM.

Guess who else is going to be there? Yes. Me. One of our staff members has to leave early to go apartment hunting so that gave this job to me. I am not going to be doing any surveys thank god. Talking to a bunch of pale skinned virgins who have emerged from parnets basement gives me the creeps. I am just there to observe and write a report of my findings.

Apparently the writer Garth Ennis is this insane Irishman who is a god in the comic book world. He wrote this book called Preacher.

I am ill prepared for this because the last comic book I read was Archie in 5th grade. And I don't know anything about this guy except the he drinks like a fish and apparently has an obsession with cowboys and homosexuals. So if any of you losers see an attracitve girl dressed in Scoop Jeans and a Juciy Couture, stay away.

On edge

2006-09-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

People are freaking out in the office. The word is that G is coming by to talk to all of us on Friday and every one is freaking out.

I walked over to Neo Geo who was frantically typing at this computer.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Preparing my resume."

"Why?"

He stopped and looked at me as if I had taken a dump on the turkey at a Thanksgiving dinner.
b
"You've never been laid off have you?"

"No."

"Ok. Whenever a boss annouces a staff wide meeting on a Friday, it means he is laying you off."

"We have staff meetings all the time."

"But never on a Friday. Its an HR tactic to always fire peopel on a Friday, that way the walking wounded have the weekend to get really drunk and depressed and they are less likely to commit suicide at work. That is why I am working on my resume which is what you should be doing too unless you have a trust fund. Now go away."

I walk off a little annoyed about that trustfund comment but he is right. I'll be fine if we get laid off. But it still sucks anyway.

Fashion Week

2006-09-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the start of Fashion Weekin New York City. If I was still with Angel feathers I would be working the runways watching Ellis and Bartlett in action. But instead I am spending my doing this.

I am doing research on an obscure 80's toy.

Maybe being laid off isn't a bad thing.

The hustle

2006-09-02T18:55:00.000-07:00

We got off early on Friday for the labor day weekend, so our group got together and got our grub on at the Great Jones Cafe in tribute to New Orleans. Nothing says condolences then chowing down po boys, garlic mashed potatoes and catfish Mealtime discussion ranged from Tom Cruise getting booted from Paramount and how lame the VMAs were. Then the discussion got serious as we talked shop and the boss began to pick away at his jalopeno cornbread and told the tale of G

“When G was in college he made money doing market research for movies. He ran around with a small tv and vcr and showed movie trailers to people on the street and then made them fill out surveys. The job was hell because he had to seek particular demographics. The worst was children. One project he was working on was this movie about a seal, I think it was called Andre and the studio wanted see if the trailer clicked with children but he required parents permission who would go apes**t if you went near their kids.

He also got to work the test screenings, which were great because he got to see movies before anyone else did for free. But that was also a pain the as because a lot of the audience members didn’t fill out their surveys properly. This was a problem because the studios would go through surveys with a fine toothed comb.

G’s job was to collect the surveys and give them to his boss who was a chain smoking, sunburned victim of the Bahamas and was in dire need of a nose job. She was a nasty piece of work who would take the incomplete surveys and then the next day the surveys would be magically completed.

One drunken night G learned about the dark underbelly of market research, his boss had broken up with her Trinidadian boyfriend and needed a shoulder to cry on at the last minute which turned out to be G.

After consuming enough margaritas to kill Lindsay Lohan she confessed to G that her job was a joke. The only reason why her firm was hired was because studios had no idea what the hell they were doing so she was there to cover their ass. If a film failed at the box office, the suits could use the test results for the marketing to shield themselves from any blame. That is why surveys had to be filled out, no matter what, which is why if there were any surveys that were blank after the screenings the melanoma girl would fill them out herself.

The next day G quit but he never forgot what he learned there. Fast forward to the dot com boom. After a year working invest banking he jumped into the dot com and became an expert in web design. His only expertise was reading about it on the web and an introduction to anthropology course from college. Besides, people just assumed he was smart since went to Harvard. It made no difference that he almost failed out in his sophomore year. “

“Venture Capital money was being dumped on any thing that had a dot in it and G was getting drenched. But he wouldn’t stay wet for long. The crash went down and for awhile he was living in his loft in Chelsea while the dot com world fell apart. He ended taking the GMAT and getting accepted to Harvard then she called.

G nicknamed her Madam Wong even though she was polish but she had this annoying obsession for Feng Shui. She had like ten mirrors in her office. Her partner was a flamboyant homosexual armed with a Phd in behavioral science. They were latter day Will and Grace expect she was really fat and ugly and he had a receding hairline and was rumored to hire male prostitutes.

The firm specialized in working with the brick and mortar companies in user acceptance testing. Because of his reputation G’s role was business development with the clientele Will’s job was to conduct the surveys and Grace’s gig was to make sure the checks cleared.

It was a good arrangement for awhile until he discovered they were playing games with the companies. Focus groups or as he would call them f**k us groups were supposed to be drawn from a random pool of applicants. It turned out Will had a private stash of applicants that he used all the time and he would influence to do his bidding. When G approached Grace about it she dismissed him telling him it was simply a cost cutting measure to reuse the same applicants since it saved money and time.

G felt like he was back in college again but this was the big time. These were companies that had the money to nail you to a wall if they found out you were ripping them off. Things became tense around the office when Will started to give him the cold shoulder and they began bump G off of some of his projects and pass them on to Will. Then one day he found his computer locked and his stuff in a box. But G knew what was up awhile ago and had made backups of his data. With all the business he had brought in he was not going quietly.

He issued several demands one of them was a hefty severance and immunity from legal action. In return he would not blow the whistle on their operation. At first Will and Grace threatened to sue the pants off of him but then decided to take the deal when their attorney told them although they could get him on violating his confidentiality agreement but the damage from all the exposure would kill their business and leave them vulnerable to an army of ambulance chasers.

So G went off to Harvard B school but instead of focusing on a career at Bear Stearns, he was intrigued about data gathering.. Even though the whole focus group or as he called it F**kus group was flawed. It was a complete rip off because all the research groups were simply dipping into the same pool. He realized that industries needed real time, authentic demographic data. Stuff that hadn’t been tampered by researchers.

That is when he began to develop the idea of creating groups that would feed any particular industry from fashion to television.”

“What’s the deal with the names? Why is each group given these funky names,”

The group let out a collective laugh. Trainer jumped in.

“G is a real military buff, I think he has read Sun Tzu a 100 times. He has a huge hard on for special forces particularly the SEALS. One book he read was Rogue Warrior by the founder of SEAL TEAM 6. It was during the cold war so he called it 6 to confuse the commies to think there were 5 other seal teams which there weren’t.”

“Which why each group has a name that represents something from that industry.” Said the boss as he took a sip of his ice tea.

“Since we deal with sci fi geek s**t we are named Tiberius, which is named after which character in Stark Trek?”

“Kirk. Tiberius is his middle name” I say nonchalantly.

The whole group broke out in cheers.

“Wow. You’re just as pathetic as the rest of us.”

“You have no idea.”

The boss continued.

“G knows that Look-Look and other companies are constantly scouring for this type of data which is why he set these groups up so it would confuse his competitors.”

“So are we going to have jobs?”

Everyone looked at me with the look of “Shut the f**k up.”

My boss went back to picking his jalapeno cornbread.

“I guess we’ll find out after the labor day weekend.” He said then popped a piece in his mouth.

An Important Annoucement

2006-08-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

Attention Kmart Shoppers. I am constipated. That will be all.

Matt Lauer: Hot and hairy

2006-08-22T20:49:00.000-07:00

OMG. I always thought he was cute in that bookish sort of way. But wow. Lauer is so diesel.

But he seriously could use a good wax. I can only imagine how bristly he is in the morning.

OMG Britney Spears is enormous

2006-08-20T22:13:00.000-07:00

Good lord! Britney just stepped for the Kid's Choice Awards wearing this maternity/summer dress. Those are definitely not implants. I hope she is storing the milk for a future date. All the boys are staring at her with their mouths dropping to the ground. Her milk mountains are quite a sight. I hope she talks about time travel.

Here comes Kevin. Okay this is weird. There is this Michael Jackson motif of young boys popping ut and a grand piano. Because every knows grand pianos makes everything classy. And now K-fed pops out from the piano. He's also throwing some ruff war lyrics because they are silencing it out.

I guess this was part of the pre-nup. Yeah he is one dope brotha. No surprise he was at the end of the show. If he performed any earlier, the audience would have walked out. Oh god Britney. What have you unleashed upon the world?

I am in pain

2006-08-20T21:15:00.000-07:00

Watching Kids Choice awards. Nick Lachey just won. Didn't show a shot of Jessica. Although I am a little young to remember the 80's, this show has that overall feeling especially Riahnna's performance with laser light shows and the fedoras. But then it again it makes sense since she is sampling tainted love. Where are you K-Fed? Show me that you are worth (as CC would say) impregnating the biggest goldmine this side of Oprah.

Day off

2006-08-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

“Dude. You have been watching way too many episodes of CSI. In order to retrieve that data you need a lab and couple of weeks. Considering your deadline, it would be a waste of my time to show up.”

“Mother******. Your time is meaningless to me. My time is the only thing that concerns me and your job is to service my time! How dare you speak to me that way? Do you know who you are? You are a f***ing drone that can be replaced at anytime by some cow worshipper in the land of the downward dog. You should be sucking my a**hole because you are employed. You better get here right now and fix this problem.”

This was my boss yesterday afternoon at 4:30 screaming on the speakerphone at the help desk or as we call them “hurt desk”. At that time our computers crashed and we were in the process of putting the finishing touches on a 100 page report for a very well sports client that was due the first thing the next morning. We usually make backups for the reports but we made some major changes that day in the report and we usually do the backups at the end of the day.

It was college all over again as if we were putting together a term paper for a hardass professor and our computers crashed. The all-nighter consisted of all of us searching for drafts, hardcopy and electric and doing more searches online. I was on bedpan duty and I went through the garbage cans and the recyclable bin to look for discarded copies. I learned too much about about my co-workers. One likes to chew on sunflower seeds, another eats reeses pieces like a fiend and there is someone is obsessed with his gums because of all the toothpicks in his garbage can.

At around 2am we had the whole report completed. The IT guy never showed up. The boss told all of us to take the day off tomorrow since it was going to be pretty light for the next couple of days.

So I am now I am withdrawing from chugging a six pack of Starbucks double shot espressos. I kind of wish I was in work because I am getting completely grossed out by the Jon Bonet Ramsey coverage.

This guy is beyond twisted and I think that a needle in the arm is too good of a punishment for him. I hope he meets the same end as Dahmer.

My new theme song.

2006-08-16T10:17:00.000-07:00

Officially addicted to Fergie's London Bridge.
Goodbye Ain't No Other Man.

When I come to the clubs, step aside
Pop the seeds, don't be hating me in the line
V.I.P because you know I gotta shine
I'm Fergie Ferg
And me love you long time

All my girls get down on the floor
Back to back drop it down real low
I'm such a lady but I'm dancing like a ho
Because you know what, I don't give a ****
So here we go!

How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge wanna go down
Like London London London
Wanna go down like
London London London
Be going down like

How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge wanna go down
Like London London London
Wanna go down like
London London London
Be going down like

Drinks start pouring
And my speech start slowing
Everybody start looking real good

The Grey Goose got the girl feeling loose
Now I?m wishing that I didn't wear these shoes
It's like everytime I get up on the dude
Papparazzi put my business in the news
And Imma get up out my face
[Oh ****]
Before I turn around and spray your *** with mace
[Oh ****]
My lips make you want to have a taste
[Oh ****]
You got that? I got the bass!

How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge wanna go down
Like London London London
Wanna go down like
London London London
Be going down like

How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge wanna go down
Like London London London
Wanna go down like
London London London
Be going down like

When I come to the clubs, step aside
Pop the seeds, don't be hating me in the line
V.I.P because you know I gotta shine
I'm Fergie Ferg
And me love you long time

All my girls get down on the floor
Back to back drop it down real low
I'm such a lady but I'm dancing like a ho
Because you know what, I don't give a ****
So here we go!

How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge wanna go down
Like London London London
Wanna go down like
London London London
Be going down like

How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge wanna go down
Like London London London
Wanna go down like
London London London
Be going down like

Pins and Needles

2006-08-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

Everyone is freaked out. Word is that that G is going to whack one of the groups. If it is our group it won't be first time.

It was really tense. All of stayed till 8 because there was word that G would be dropping in and see who was slacking off.

Sigh. Looks like another pint of BJ tonight.

Its too hot to blog

2006-08-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

I have been a bad little princess. But it is not my fault. This new job is running me into the ground. Trainer is teaching me Quick Books and excel. He is a complete utter taskmaster, yelling at me everytime I make a mistake. So far I have gotten into three screamign matches with him. Each time we scream the boss comes in and screams at us to shut up. It must be the heat.

In meantime I give you Kelly Clarkson's enormous carbodydrated belly. You can't look away.

Runway all the way.

2006-07-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

I just spent the entire day doing research on BattleStar Galactica. If I hear the word Cylon or Viper I will freak.

Thank god for Project Runway. Second episode kicked asss. Angela you are lucky they didn't kick you off the show. It was sooo obvious you were trying to have Kayne give you good coattail. But honey, every straight woman knows gay man only give coattail to other gay men.

It soooo obvious why Angela was looking for a sugar designer. Did you see what the biatch wore? She had these awful tight green pants that were two different shades of green. The darker shade was around her crouthc. It look liked she had a serious case of crack sweat. Or maybe she did.

Listen Anglea. Your job is to shut your mouth and know your role. If that means standing by Vincent and doing nothing then that's your job.

You are sooo lucky that Malan "aufed" and you didn't. If you better shape up girl or you are soo going down.

Tired

2006-07-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

I am awaiting for the data to be backed up on my boss's computer. My boss is completely paranoid about viruses and crap. Apparently he had some bad experiences during his dot com days.

This was Trainer's job and now it is mine.

The only thing I have to look forward tonight is watching Project Runway on the Tivo. My weekend is built on improvosation so whatever happens happens.

Dear God. Please let this lead to something bigger and better.

Back up done. I am out of here.

Stoli now

2006-07-17T22:36:00.000-07:00

At around 11 am today air conditoning in the office went down. Within a hour the boss told everyone to take off and work from home. There was no way anything was going to get done. But did moi get to leave?

No. The trainer saw this as an opporuntity for me to learn how to deal with facilities. He told me that one of the responsibilities of the coordinator is put out fires. Then he toldme to stay hydrated just as left me alone in the sweltering office.

So for three hours I boiled in my own sweat while trying to locate the facilties manager. I took some breaks to step outside to try and cool off but that was not happening. When I did get the facilities manager he told me that they were working on it and everything would be up and ready by tomorrow.

So far my days have been filled with editing reports about comic books, arranging travel for comic book conventions. And if I hear another person raving about how Brandon Routh is an amazing Superman I will slam my head into a wall.

I miss fashion. I miss talking about shoes. I miss talking about being a girly girl.

Project Runway: Apartment Wardrobe

2006-07-12T23:09:00.000-07:00

PROJECT RUNWAY! YES!
Stacey deserved to get whacked. She didn't even know how to operate a sewing machine. High on concept but on a snail's level when it comes to execution. Jeffrey dodged a bullet. That shredded dress with the back short and front long, it was very unflattering. I thought Heidi was going stuff it down his throat. As for Vincent, he must have been hopped up on something because that hat was beyond fugly.

I liked the idea of how they had to cannabilize their own apartments for materials. It was so funny when they came back and their places were still f**ked up.

Keith won and stuck to his own vision. I thought the dress was darling so suck it Tim. This is Project Runway! Not Parsons where you can push around your fashion slaves around. It just goes to show the experts don't know everything.

Thank God for Project Runway. It is my escape from the commic book geek hell that I am in now. The last thing I want to do right now is to blog about it.

First Day of work

2006-07-10T22:32:00.000-07:00

Today I arrived at 9 am at the office to find it pretty much empty. My boss was quite apologetic. He thought the guy who was supposed to train was still recovering from last night. In fact it would only us in the office since the rest of the staff drove all night from Baltimore because of car trouble.

"What were they doing?" I asked

My boss sipped his coffee.

"They were at shore leave."

"Shore leave? Is that Navy thing?"

My boss's face lit up witha light smirl.

"Shore Leave is a sci fi convention that takes place in Baltimore every year. It is primarily focused on Star Trek, hence the term Shore Leave."

He probably saw my the weird look on my face and stopped.

"You'll figure it out. Here."

He went over to a desk and turned on a computer for me and showed me the site.

The moment I started to look at the site I just wanted to walk out of the office. I mean I didn't understand half the stuff that was on the site. I mean what the hell is Farscape? And who are these people?

I know I could have just quit right. Tell the whole world to f**k off. I got screwed over already from ym last job. I don't owe anyone anything. And none of those people are going to miss me anyway.

But I stay. I don't quit. I stick around. Why. Because I have to.

Lunch hour rolled around and the boss told me that I could take my time but just be back at 3pm. Which was fine because I needed to get out of the office.

I ended up walking around the city and found myself at B Republic at Grand Central. They were in their close out sale so I snagged these really cute cotton shirts that had their prices slashed.

I got back at around 2:45 and the boss had me sitdown for a conference call. The guy on the other line was supposed to train me. Trainer was really cool and apologized for today and that he appreciated that I showed up. He told me that he would be in tomorrow and that we could start then.

So here I am now stuffing my face with Trader Joe's papa dums. I am really not looking forward to tomorrow because I will be actually doing work.

Are you in or are you out?

2006-07-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

I'm in.

Decisions

2006-06-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

Some of you have been saying that I should ditch the job for something better. Particuarly because of how weird the guy was. I took your advice and spoke to my former boss about what happened. He was anoyed but not surprised. He told me that head of that group is very straight forward, sometimes to a fault and he apologized if I was offended. I actually wasn't offended but I told him I just wanted to make sure the guy was normal.

I asked him for other leads, but G told me he hadn't heard anything and he told me that it might be awhile since it was already summer and most of the companies had already hired college graduates or were at the final phases of interviewing.

My mom thought my interveiwer's stories were hilarious, dad was a little alarmed and told me to let the guy know I had a father who could make him dissappear and get away with it.

It is a weird place and if I had the opportunity to trim Anna Wintour's nose hairs, I would probably do that. But right now this is in front of me and I see this as a chance to challenge myself. I mean if I can work with a bunch of virgins who worship Harrison Ford from Star Trek then I should be able work anywhere.

Let's see what happens.

Subway Camera fight

2006-06-26T17:38:00.000-07:00

I saw the weirdest thing today on the subway. I was taking the 1 train uptown, holding the pole waiting for my stop when I notice this girl sitting on my left, I think she was like 18, dressed in Mischa Barton wear. Designer jeans, I think they were Joe Jeans and a this white top that I know is a rip off from Pookie and Sebastian because I saw them same one a flea market and the seller claimed it was the real thing. Her hair was perfectly highlighted which matched her prestine manicured hands. She held a LV bag on her lap which was crushing with her hands as they squeezed into fists. She had the classic “What the f**k are you looking at?” expression on her face which is the typical upper west side rich white girl pose.

I looked across from her and saw this guy staring at her. Looked like he was in his late 20’s and he was decked out in J Crew wear. Blue dress shirt, kahki’s and loafers and was kind of cute if he lost like 20 pounds. Anyways the look on his face was “What the f**k are you talking about?”

I don’t think this guy was checking her out, the vibe I got was that maybe he was looking around and she was having a bad day waiting to unload her skunk eye on her first unsuspecting victim and he happened to be in her cross hairs.

Anyways neither of them would back off and were locked on each other like heat seeker missiles. You would have thought that they broke up with each other. Anyways for like three steps the staredown continued between the two, I mean you would not want to walk between the two of them for fear of bursting into flames.

Then the girl opened up her LV hand bag and began to dig around and came up with her cell phone which she opened up and pointed at the guy. From out of nowhere the guy whipped out a text book on Investing and began to read it but it was obvious that he was hiding behind it.

Every know and then he would peek from his cover and would snap behind it seeing that she still had the phone in her hand. From my angle I wasn’t sure what she was doing. Was reading some emails, playing tetris or trying to take that guy’s picture?

I think people were looking at me weird because I could barely hold myself together. This guy is afraid of this girl supposedly taking his picture. I mean he probably outweighed hear about 20 pounds. What was funnier to me was that no one else noticed.

Then at 79 st she shoved the phone in her bag and got off, before she left she made this passive aggressive move and whipped her LV bag over her shoulder enve though it is hand bag but it was obvious that she was trying to hit the guy with the book which she slightly knicked. As she got off he put the book down and stared at her cursing at her under his breath.

I was still trying to figure out why this guy was freaking out over her camera phone until I read this.

My guess is that he probably read about flashers being busted with camera phones was afraid of her taking a photo of him online and telling everyone that he was a flasher or a perv. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t but he would have been royally screwed if that was what she wanted to do.

Was that her intention? Did she want to smear his reputation and make him look like a complete sicko? Was she that much of a b**ch to do that? Or did she really feel threatened by this guy?

From what I saw it just looked like two passive aggressives going toe to toe and one person was willing to take it one step further

I have been lucky enough never been to be flashed or groped and I am really glad that the NYPD is taking action and busting these pervs and I think it is awesome that women are taking back the subwa cars with their camera phones. It seems that is the only way we can fight back.

Personally I think falshers and perves who feel women up on the train should be beaten on the spot. People like that are sick and don’t belong in society. I mean thif you are going to be perveristic go to a strip club.

But what is uncool if a woman is using camera phone to exact vendettas because she was slighted on the train by some guy who happened to glance in her direction.

http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/06/23/undercover_cops.php#comments

Goodbye Dynasty

2006-06-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

Farewell Aaron Spelling. Dynasty and 90210 made were huge influences on my life.

Batman and erotic stories

2006-06-13T17:12:00.000-07:00

“The first job I ever I got was in porn.”

I am sitting in my Donna Karan powersuit, my hairs is tied back in a tight bun and now I am hearing war stories from my interviewers days as a jizz peddler. And he hasn’t even looked at my resume.

My heart is beating from consuming massive amounts of macchiatos and frosted flakes but I try to remain as cool as possible and concentrate on his office to distract myself which is not the hardest thing to do. His office is one big bookshelf stuffed with books, actually comic books, I see some toys lying around on the floor. But what is odd is that his desk is completely impeccable.

He interrupts my game of clue as he continues his story.

“When I first got out of college I wanted to write for Batman. But I found out that even in the world of comic books is quite competitive. And no one took you seriously if you had no experience but the only way to get experience was to work on a comic book. It is just like getting a SAG card.

But I kept at it. I even took an unpaid internship at a comic book company and I learned everything I could about publishing and comics and created a network for myself. The fruits of my labot were three interviews from DC comics.”

He paused dramatically then whispered.

“Do you know what the result was of those interviews?”

I whispered back
“No.”

“Doughnut holes.”

“Doughnut holes?”

“Nada, zip zilch. They always found a way to hire someone in house. The funny thing is that a lot of those people don’t like comics, in fact the woman who interviewed me last never read comics and got the job at DC because her brother was a big time artist there.”

He leaned back in his chair and began stroking his beard.

“Then one day I was leafing through one of my roommate’s spank rags and came across the erotic story section. On a lark I called up the publisher and asked him who writes for him because the stories were horrible. Right on the spot he commissioned me to write a spring break gangbang story involving a mariachi band, a box of sombreros and three tequila worms. Two hours later I sent my piece of over and I got a check for 300 bucks.”

He paused for a reaction. I didn’t give him one.

“When I told my writing buddies what I had done they all told me that I was insane and I was going to ruin any chances of having a legitimate writing career. But as far as I was concerned I was legit, since I was getting paid for my work. Besides I was running low on funds and my unpaid internship wasn’t exactly brining in the big bucks.

It was a good year for gangbangs because a lot of porn stars were branding themselves as gangbang stars. A lot of sperm died that year.

At a party thrown by one of my publishers and I am talking to this guy about action figures, then onto cartoons. It turns out this is the publisher’s son and he had just got out of college and daddy was giving him some seed money for his start up which was going to be the NYC version of Aint It cool News. So I jumped on as managing editor. A year later that went under and he went to Harvard Business school.

It didn’t matter since I had reinvented myself and was now know as the big geek and served a consultant for toys and comic book companies. I wasn’t writing Batman but I got paid to read Batman and play with the merchandise. I was also hired to review their ideas to see if they were any good.

A couple of months ago I got an email from my old boss inviting me for lunch to introduce me to his friend G. We hit it off and when G told me about his media trends venture, I was hooked and here we are.”

He looked at me with a slight smile.

“Do you know what the point of that story is?”

“Go into porn?”

He laughs to himself.

“No. The point of that story is to show how goals can be achieved in the oddest of ways. Even in the places where you least expect.”

He looked down at his desk as if he was reading an imaginary book then locked into my eyes.

“I’ll be honest with you, you are not what I am looking for in a coordinator. I am actually looking for someone with a different background.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because I am intrigued by your situation. I know how you got screwed over at Angel Feathers, you have good references and from your reports you demonstrate a very keen mind. What I do admire that despite being treated so unfairly, you didn’t pull a Single White Female and go crazy. “

“Thank you.”

“I have to warn you right now, this group is focused on geek culture which is primarily the sci fi fantasy genre. It has absolutely nothing to do with fashion.

The position of coordinator means you will be assisting a staff of 5 guys, this means making sure our expenses are paid, packages are delivered and our travel arrangements are completed. At certain times you will be required to do research and analysis to pick up the slack. You will be in an environment where the staff will engage in lengthy debates regarding who is a better captain Kirk or Picard? There is one guy in our staff who thinks he is a Jedi Knight and we have one guy who clocked some time at Roswell looking for UFOs.

\“So basically I am going to be a nanny for a bunch of overgrown children.”

“Uhh, yeah.”

I suck in my breath.

“Do you need an answer now?”

“No. Take your time. In fact you can get back to me next week. I realize this is a complete change from what your goals are but as I said sometimes your goals can be achieved through very unusual steps. I mean look at my career. I started out writing sexual fantasies for 35 year old virgins and sexually starved husbands with frigid wives. And here I am making six figures writing about whether Batman could beat the Punisher.”

That was last week. I am still thinking about what to do next.

It's a go

2006-06-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

I've got an interview tomorrow. The guy finally called and he wants to see me tomorrow. Now I am regretting scarfing down these mozzarella sticks. Damn you TGI Friday's with your line of frozen appetizers. Now I have to hvae a psyllium fiber shake.

What every cute thin girl needs: A fat friend

2006-05-31T23:25:00.000-07:00

I just watched the reality Cheyenne on MTV. It is a bit more polished then the Hills but I really enjoyed it. Obviously they are using the Osbornes/Jessica Simpson reality show mold to boost up her career.

What really got me thinking is not Cheyenne but her friend Whitney, who is not exactly the thinnest girl in the world. I am not trying to start a fat war. She is not a stick and ther eis notthing wrong with that. But what I wonder is that is she really her best friend? Or was she picked by casting because the two are so different looking. It would make sense since they are already have a family of thin blondes including Cheyenne's sister and her mother.

Did the producers take Cheyenne aside and say "Listen, you are cute and thin and I know you barely know this girl and she has no business wearing tight pants but if you stand aside her as much as possible you will look more cute and thin."

Makes you wonder.

Back to the beach

2006-05-29T23:49:00.000-07:00

Weather was quite thunderstormy in the Hamptons but it didn’t damper the drinking and other alcohol-induced destruction.

Ex-Jdate invited me over to his summer share that he was staying at with his fraternity brothers. It was the first weekend for everyone in the Hamptons so we spent the weekend breaking in the house. Besides the drinking, the only thing that occurred over the weekend was this fight.

I was sitting with some girls talking about how sad it was that Marissa died and that the OC is so ovah when we heard these two guys screaming at each other. Between them was one girl who was pushing one of the guys away. She wasn’t doing very well until two of Ex-Jdate’s fraternity brothers jumped and pulled them apart. It was actually kind of funny because they are these big ass Korean guys who use to play rugby and they literally threw the two white guys over their shoulders as if they were sides of beef.

Later that night Ex-Jdate told me the deal about those three while making screwdrivers.

“S and A have been friends since Andover. Anyways. C is A’s boyfriend and a fight broke out between the two and A was the one pushing C back.”

“Love triangle?”

I asked as I sipped my vodka and orange.

“No way. S and A are strictly platonic. It is just that since S and C met, it has been like fire and gasoline.”

“What’s up with that?”

“All I know is that those two have had a hard time getting along. But it isn’t lack of trying, at least on S’s account. He has made every effort to extend his friendship to him but C has returned with frost. But S has taken it since he know A is head over heels in love with C and doesn’t want to cause trouble.”

“So what broke the camels back?”

“From what I gathered it was over a golf game. Last they all went out to dinner and S brought an old college buddy to meet everyone. What happened was that C lit up like a Christmas tree and focused his entire conversation on S’s college buddy. He wouldn’t let S get a word edgewise and totally dominated the conversation. Then in front of S’s face, C invited his college buddy out to a golf game and this pushed S completely over the edge since C has never even invited him out to lunch.”

“Wow. That’s pretty f**king rude.”

“Yeah. So tonight, S got drunk and called C out on that and told him what a two faced a##hole he is and that he spit in his hand when S put out in friendship. And well you know the end of that story.”

“So what is C’s damage?”

“He’s acting like a guy.”

“A stupid guy.”

“No. A normal.”

“Huh? I don’t get it.”

Ex Jdate poured himself another vodka and orange and slowly dropped some ice.

“C views S as a threat. Plain and simple.”

“Why? S and A are just friends.”

“And there lies the problem?”

“Why? I think would have been a problem if S was A ex.”

“Actually that would have put C’s mind at east if that was the case.”

“Why?”

“Because that option would have been explored if S and A had been in a relationship. But since that has never happened it something C’s perceives hanging over everyone’s head.”

“Are you saying that A would hook up with S?”

“No. In fact it would never happen. It is just since they have never gone there, there is always that possibility they might take that road less traveled to see where it leads. And I think now that C has a relationship with A, he fears that S will freak out and realize that A will be spending more time with C and maybe he is losing a chance to be with her.”

“Wait a minute. C thinks that S will try to jump A’s bones because she won’t be around as much.”

“In C’s mind. Yes. But that is never going to happen. S has yellow fever. And A has always said that nothing will ever go beyond friendship. But in C’s mind, that gives him very little assurance.”

“But S isn’t even a threat.”

Ex-Jdate drained the last of his screwdriver.

“All men are threats.” He said as he tossed his cup in the garbage. “Even the ones that aren’t.”