dialogue over dinner

wife: fucking raymond. fucking mark summers. fucking fuck. fuck. shit. fucking. fuck.

me: so... how's that tourette's going?

wife: penis.

Harvard Affiliate Nearly Robbed Outside Kirkland

see, this makes no sense to me. there are plenty of good places to try to rob someone in harvard square. in front of kirkland house is probably the worst.

yes, it's a slow enough day that i'm reading the crimson.

holy crap.

funny lookin'?

last night, the wife and i had finished up our standard romantic dinner and were all in our pj's and getting ready to snuggle into bed, when my phone rang. it was my dear cousineighbor, calling to suggest that i accompany her to an improv show at her home away from home, the upright citizens brigade theatre (they spell it all britishy because they're snobby and dyslexic). i looked at my watch. it was already after 9 and creeping towards my 10:00 bedtime.

"fuck it," i said, and went.

it was really fun. the performers were writers for snl and the daily show, which made me feel cool by osmosis. and i had a great excuse to skip my run this morning.

so.

took the good ol' greyhound back to boston this weekend for the Dynamic Women in Business conference at hbs.

what a waste of a saturday.

i just want to know when they're going to have the "type-b slacker women in business" conference, cause that's more my speed. then again, they probably couldn't get their shit together to actually pull that off, and no one would actually bother going, so maybe it's not going to happen.

on the upside, i returned with 2-3 fewer inches of hair, clean underwear, a new sweater and a george forman grill. on balance: worth it, i think.

thinking of me? how sweet.

early this morning, i got an im from an ex-whathaveyou, telling me that he woke up with the worst hangover he's had in a long time. and - get ready to be really touched - it made him think of me.

all together now: "awwwwwwwwww..."

more excellent monkey shots

enjoy some of these less ugly monkeys, in case you have a life, or job, that prevents you from scouring the site like i did:

also, know that you can ADOPT A MONKEY, thus making yourself the coolest person i know, without contest.

quite possibly the greatest thing i've ever seen

if this shit is for real - and it looks like it is - then this is the best thing ever. maggie's boss, mr. pit, apparently just donated enough to provide fruit, vegetables and training treats for two monkeys in training.

what a fine citizen.

a bad sign

i just got home from work. i get a call from mom:

mom: does your office have caller ID?
me: yes.
mom: oh. hmm....

and i can't believe i forgot to mention

alta, the fantastic tapas place in the village where we dined friday night. definitely check it out. definitely get the bacon-wrapped dates. i also recommend all the desserts on the menu, particularly the bittersweet chocolate risotto.

aw, crap. now i'm drooling.

a theological test

if i make it to the weekend without getting shitcanned, i'll know there is a god. and that - for some reason - she likes me.

the weekend hiatus

good times, good times.

yesterday, we had brunch at essex. the food gets a 9.5. the service gets a 1. it's worth it if you have the time and patience for the retardedly long wait (we waited for a table for about an hour and a half, and waited for forks for ten minutes after our food arrived). the waitstaff is overworked and incompetent and sometimes downright rude (see amelia's story for a shocking example) but the cocktails flow like lube at the adult movie awards and the people-watching is unbeatable. plus, you can entertain yourself during your excruciatingly long wait by exploring the shabby-chic neighborhood and all it has to offer, particularly economy candy (i am enjoying my new ernie-shaped pez dispenser at this very moment) and toys in babeland (and my mini flashlight-keyring-vibrator... i think i might lose my job today).

then, when we had barely digested that schmorgasboard, we headed crosstown to dine with friends in their fucking spectacular new palace of an apartment. as they are good cooks and tidy people with a pull-out couch in a very convenient location, i intend to invite myself to many a pajama party there.

i am in absolute awe of this person's genius

disclaimer: i stole this from patsy.

methinks gawker knows too much

in their coverage of naked sunday, gawker links to another article. and, in what can only be a freaky/awesome mistake, they refer to "Julie No-Pants Subway Ride".

they're on to me.

inexplicably fun

bea arthur and i are the same height! check it out.

help!

i went to amazon because there was one book - one! - that i wanted. now i have $172.30 worth of shit in my cart, and i don't know what to take out. i'm not even a very literate person. most of this is angry feminist bitch lit and last year's new york times bestsellers cause i'm mainstream and cheesy. but i want it all. maybe you can help. here's what i have:

- curtis sittenfeld: prep
- mary gaitskill: veronica
- haruki murakami: kafka on the shore
- simone de beauvoir: the second sex
- betty friedan: the feminist mystique
- naomi wolf: the beauty myth
- zadie smith: on beauty (i hear it's set at "not harvard", which makes me want to read it)
- joan didion: the year of magical thinking
- maureen dowd: are men necessary? (don't even try to talk me out of this one)
- ana marie cox (a.k.a. wonkette): dog days

(oh, there's also some other random merch in there, hanging closet organizers and shit that i kinda need, which explains why the total is higher than maybe it would seem it should be)

so help me out here, kids! which of these have you read and hated? and which of these should i not bother with? and which of these do you own and want to lend me so i don't have to eat dust bunnies and back issues of Us magazine next month?

go away, i'm busy reading the 220-page transcript of paris hilton's deposition.

is it possible

that my feet are shrinking?

amazon wants to make sure i have protection

riddle of the day

q: what do you get when you cross a bus full of angry new yorkers and indignant patriots fans, a traffic jam, and a drug-addled driver?

a: that's right, it's our six-hour ride home!

yesterday, at around 4:00 pm EST, the wife and i decided (naively enough) to board a boston-to-new york bus. four and a half hours, right? maybe faster, given that the "holiday" status would free us of that sticky "rush hour" problem, right? yeah?

wrong. we failed to take into account 1) insane traffic for most of the ride (why? we still don't know.) and 2) the fact that our driver was apparently on smack.

more than once, upon encountering a traffic jam, he pulled over to the side of the road, staggered to the back of the bus, did something (we didn't ask questions) in the bathroom, and plopped himself down in one of the rear seats while befuddled passengers glanced around in disbelief. apparently, the best way to clear a traffic jam is to just FUCKING GIVE UP.

anyway, disastrous ride home aside, the weekend was good, smirnoff ice-fueled fun. we had our first taste of impending "marriage" at pauline's engagement party, reconnected with the ya-yas and did some serious outlet shopping damage. plus, i got to stay in the parents' house even though they were out of town, which was fun because it felt like breaking and entering.

umm... is amazon threatening me?

for those of you who don't perform a lot of emergency first aid, that's a defibrillator. as in, KA-CHUNG-zap!

another worthy point

From: Matt
To: Julie
Date: Jan 13, 2006 3:51 PM

Along with your stated reasons, I'm hoping Brangelina's baby is ugly just so that SealHeid can have an ugly celebrity-baby playmate.

jennifer aniston isn't so tapped in after all

it turns out brangelina didn't tell jen about the pregnancy ahead of time. which means that she found out about it just like the rest of us: from patsy.

i genuinely hope the brangeletus ends up ugly. not because i have strong feelings about them, their relationship, world politics, or anything with any moral leanings, but just because i think it would be funny. really, really funny. or at least kinda funny.

oy.

dinner with friends last night at joshua tree = excellent.

but oh, where did my alcohol tolerance go?

roughly 3 drinks down (with dinner, mind you) and i was down for the count. now, this may not sound remarkable to you, but bear in mind that i normally have the tolerance of a mid-sized pro football player.

miraculously dragged myself to work this morning (with some assistance from the lovely folks over at the mta) and was delighted to find an assload of diet coke and equal had been delivered to the office - two very important commodities in my life that we had been lacking for weeks. what can i say? i loves me some aspartame.

this weekend, i am super pumped to announce, the wife and i will be journeying to old boston to attend the engagement (gasp!) party of pauline, one of my/our dearest childhood friends. absolutely psyched out of my mind to see so many people i haven't seen in so very long, and to get to know the groom-to-be a little better and maybe strike a little healthy fear into his heart (hey, it's what i do best).

just keeping you on your toes, kiddos

i only check overheard once a week

so forgive me if you've seen this one:

Chick #1: And I was like, goddamn, it's food...I can eat it, you know?
Chick #2: Seriously. Just because she's anorexic doesn't mean she can impose her thoughts about food on you!
Chick #3: Wait, wait, wait. Back up. You ate a cracker you found on the floor of the subway?

--Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, Bayard Street

speaking of bulimia...

so, i fulfilled my dream of reading the lindsay lohan piece in vanity fair. when i finished, i closed the magazine (because, honestly, what else do i care about in VF?) with a sense of satisfaction. lindsay, it seemed to me, had come around and was turning back into the spunky starlet that i once actually liked. with her dramatic flair, she had confessed to being a rail-blowing, card-maxing, chunk-hurling whack job who craves attention just as much as anybody else. plus, with a little meat on her, she's hot again.

but sadly, it wouldn't stay that way. yesterday (or the day before, i think), that whack job went and took it all back. she (/her publicist) issued a statement (to teen people, of all places) saying VF "misused and misconstrued" her statements.

too bad, babycakes. you were thisclose to being cool in my book. now you're just another skanky snowflake in the blizzard of trashy, vapid celebrity bullshit.

simmer down, kiddies

i know, i know, i'm slacking. but i'm trying. besides, i've heard that the best part of a long-term bloglationship is the makeup blog. so, enjoy.

i noticed on my way home yesterday that the mannequins in Strawberry by 6th ave have unnecessarily prominent nipples. seriously, what's up with that?

well, i guess it caught my attention. but it didn't make me want to buy their clothes. on the other hand, i did feel strangely compelled to go watch some low-budget cable porn. maybe they're in cahoots with the lovely fellas over on 8th ave.

in other news, i had dinner last night at a really great cuban restaurant near times square with my long-lost little "brother" and his current squeeze toy. i didn't get to spend as much time with them as i would have liked (they were on their way to see sweeney todd, and i was Envy McJealous), but it was lots of fun nonetheless. plus, this place makes truly fabulous passionfruit mojitos.

a retraction

the same friend who alerted me to wal-mart's questionable marketing techniques points out that i may have been a little hard on them:

Oh come now. Wal-Mart doesn't HATE black people. They just don't differentiate between them and, say, feces-flinging orangutans who sniff each others butts. I think there's a big difference there, and that you owe the good folks at Wal-Mart an apology.

he's right. and so, lovely wal-mart folk, i'm sorry.

sorry that you're such a bunch of assholes!

(zing!)

also: in case you didn't know, wal-mart is evil

in addition to being generally pure evil, wal-mart hates black people (3rd item).

christina aguilera is the only one who understands me

January 9, 2006 -- CHRISTINA Aguilera has dismissed disparaging remarks made by Kelly Osbourne, insisting the cherubic reality-show starlet must be infatuated with her. Aguilera, who wed music executive Jordan Bratman in November, says she can find no other explanation for Osbourne's recent spate of catty comments. Aguilera claims she's convinced the attention she's getting is merely masking Osbourne's romantic feelings for her, reports contactmusic.com. She says, "Kelly must have a crush on me because she's always saying mean things about me."

see? this is what i've been saying all along. this is why susie said such mean things about me after i made out with her boyfriend. she obviously wanted a three-way. and this is why katie called me a bitch after i stole her money and jewelry box and shoes. *sigh*. it must be so hard for all these women to be so in love with me and know that they can never have me.

this guy was secretary of the navy.

but at least he had a sense of humor about it.

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.
- John Lehman

oh... are you still here?

whoopsie. took a little hiatus there. hiya. didja miss me?

i thought so.

what's the story? don't even ask.

anyhoo, i'm back at the helm of this fine "publication", and of my life. as it were. in the time since you last heard from me, i have

- seen match point: very good. not one, but two smoldering hot dudes. recommend it highly
- seen broken flowers: very disappointing. recommend it if you like slow, pointless movies that could have been fabulous but are executed terribly. shame on you, jim jarmusch.
- spun some magic with the wife in the kitchen, in the form of at least three to-die-for recipes
- spied natalie portman at lower east side acid trip Happy Ending
- re-watched stay tuned (john ritter's finest work), as should you
- treated myself to some killer sky-high stack-heeled brown knee boots. they have buckles on them that unfortunately jingle when i walk around my too-quiet office
- treated myself to some designer jeans of questionable authenticity
- had an acute craving for tasti d-lite. ok, so that one is actually happening right now

incoherent babble to come later. it's good to be back.

such a cosmopolitan readership i have!

states we're still waiting on:

delaware
montana
north dakota
south carolina
west virginia
wyoming

other countries we've reached out and touched:

albania
australia
belgium
brazil
canada
chile
denmark
dominican republic
ecuador!!
finland
france
germany
hong kong
hungary
india
indonesia
ireland
israel
italy
jamaica
japan
jordan
korea
kuwait
malaysia
mexico
netherlands
new zealand
norway
pakistan
poland
portugal
scotland
singapore
slovenia
spain
sweden
switzerland
taiwan
turkey
u.k.
ukraine
venezuela
yemen
zimbabwe

i know i shouldn't be admitting this, but

i am absolutely dying to read the lindsay lohan bit in the new vanity fair.

but then again, i maintain that i thought she was the shit before it was fashionable, and before she turned into a coked out superwhore. i'm talking in the days of her halfway decent remake of the parent trap. ok, that's a lie. she was like 10 then. but that was when i first recognized that dennis quaid is The Hotness.

better late than never

i know, christmas is over, but most of you jesus freaks still have your damn lights up, so i thought it wouldn't be too late to post the best rant i've found so far on the war on christmas, "fuck christmas", and to marvel at the fact that i hadn't found it until now. be sure to check out all the ridiculous shit he links to.

and to all a happy new year

a number of you have asked what i did on new year's eve. well, although i had a fabulous time, i didn't come away with any really interesting stories. i was going to make one up, but a terminal combination of laziness and complete lack of imagination has thwarted me once again. suffice it to say, booze was consumed, onlookers were scandalized, tickets were scalped, bathrooms were barfed in (not by me, for the record), and balls were dropped. fun times were had by all, or so we hypothesize based our scattered, hazy memories.

the other question i've been fielding is whether i've made any new year's resolutions this year. as i live by the theory that setting low or no expectations is the only way to live (at 22, yes, i am a bitter, cynical old hag), i mostly haven't. except that i sort of have, but nothing beyond the usual meat loaf of drink less, eat better, exercise harder and sleep more. all moderately attainable, if you're a person of self-respect and discipline.....

hey, where'd my dozen donuts go?


as for the brief 2005 recap, here it comes.

things i did in the past 12 months:

- graduated from an arguably decent college
- made all the necessary preparations to apply to grad school
- vowed never to apply to grad school
- consumed enough alcohol to poison an entire cattle farm, or two
- eaten hundreds of burritos and thousands of eels
- found myself adrift in a sea of "adulthood", including a fantastic thing i've discovered called Independence

and, down here, i was going to put a list of things i plan to do in the next 12 months, but i, um... prefer to let you use your imagination. yeah. that's right.

happy new year, bitches.

the Times spoils cuteness by talking about it

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

"rounded", "soft", "clumsy"... ok, ok, i'll take "cute" instead of "beautiful". or even "decent". come on, give me something here.

swayze may be crazy,

but he'll always be the lovably rough-around-the-edges, heart-of-gold johnny castle to me.