Emor abbcelrS bginos!

That is, "More Scrabble bingos!"

A few nights ago: MILLIONS for 86 points with the triple word score.

How hot am I?

Some have complained that I only post MY top scores, and none of my opponents.

That is because my opponents are WEAK (10 points) compare to me. And because though my opponents have boards in front of them that spell REBUKES (for 92+ potential points), they are not adept enough to play them.

Garbage Tragedy

Last night: wrote a whole big fucking long blog about the bridge and tunnel bitches who flashed their perky tits on the dancefloor at Webster Hall's classy Thursday night act: Playgirl's GIRL'S NIGHT OUT celebration. Full of snark, wit, and shit, but then, with one mistaken keystroke, Blogger gobbled it up and I never saw it again.

So instead of trying to recapture all my witty titty ditties, I spent five hours transferring files from my old computer to my new computer.

(You'll never learn about how Laura and I ushered at the Astor Place Theater and saw Blue Man Group for free, where the only revelation of the night was that they throw shit at you. (Are they Gallagher ? I mean, what the fuck? It is "whimsical" and "well choreographed" and "subversive of audience/participant delimiters," and all that $69/seat neo-dada crap that it pretends it is, but really, they ought to advertise their greatest draw on their posters: you get to watch busloads of Ohio pre-teens get their plastic ponchos sprayed with gelatinous orange coagulations. I mean, gelatinous orange coagulations in addition to the gelatinous orange coagulations that already cover their pubescent pores. I went with Laura and we spent the first hour exchanging "Thank GOD we didn't pay for this shit" looks and the second hour sniffing around our seats, trying to find the source of the poop smell that emanated down our row.

You'll never learn how the Playgirl party, which I thought would be fag heaven, was actually an E. 11 th street extension of Bergen County, where the non-lesbian women call their friends "girlfriends" and drink green tea cocktails and wear varicose-vein-squeezingly-tight white jeans and hoop earrings and no bras and crepe-paper smocks, and the men are not homosexuals but merely poorly-rendered metrosexuals, all hair gel, ribbed t-shirts and pectoral muscles in various states of roid-deflation. Laura and I were like sensibly-shod Jacques Cousteaus descended upon the wonderful world of lampreys. The poor gay bartenders and their admirable sangfroid in the face of their own toplessness and tiplessness (cheap-ass Jersey girls, snapping up free drinks but not leaving a thing for the men who poured them); the free issues of Playgirl (FLACCID PENISES! HAIRLESS CROTCHES! I want my money back); the hurried rush to the exit (careful to make no eye contact); sandwiching Playgirl into the latest New Yorker so I could read it in shame on the train.

Next Thursday night: same party time, same party place, different party clothes. Going high femme, lipstick and wigs and all. Free entry and free drinks. Free anthropology. Anyone else who wants to join, write me.

You'll never learn about these things, no, because instead of re-writing my blogpost, what I did last night was far more shameful than a thousand Thursdays of Playgirl's GIRL'S NIGHT OUT. What I did was like getting caught by your dad, who is bringing you tangerines that he peeled himself, looking at straight porn on your computer when you are 22 years old and back in Palo Alto for winter break and he thinks you're working very hard on your senior thesis at Harvard University, a prestigious place where your prestigious thesis, about the cult of "objectivity" in news reporting, requires diligent late night effort, when actually all you are doing is examining the various positions of heterosexual coupling profiled on SEXXXYSLUTZ.org, and he drops off the tangerines and looks up and sees the screen and blurts out, "It's all sex!" and backs out the door in a hurry and you don't even turn your head to look at him because your face is the color of nasturtiums in bloom.

Oh, a digression. What I did last night was nearly so humiliatingly bad. I got suckered by myself into reading about myself. I'm an obsessive documenter (Duh! Welcome to my blog! Today I ingested 67.5 ounces of tap water and excreted 2.3 pounds of refuse, and then I thought manly thoughts of self-sacrifice at 2:43.32 p.m. before patting my dog's head 14 times with a gentle but firm counterstroke) and a complete narcissist (Duh! Here I am, here are my innards, this is my colonoscopy webcam, here is every pearl of wisdom that has issued forth from the divinity that masquerades as my lips). I started my first journal in 1986 and still have it somewhere. So I have kept everything I have written since I was in 8 th grade, all neatly tucked in to "My Documents" on my computer. This now-massive folder has undergone four computer changes seamlessly.

So last night, as I transferred files from one laptop ("Gluey") to the new laptop ("Jondalar"), I delved into a long-fallow file folder: "Old Emails." There were about two hundred files in this folder, all email transcripts from my fas.harvard.edu account, long dead. And what do I do? I click on the one that's bound to create the most heartache and scroll through all 200-some emails, 1998 to 2003, learning all about lovelorn lornlost lost lusting lackluster listing labyrinthine love from the perspective of someone who I haven't heard from in two years and who hasn't listened to me in three or four years. Crap. There was lots of cringing, some laughter, some heartthrobbing. Man, it was like a good movie. Man alive, whoo, oo.

Okay, I find now that I have nothing interesting to say about that at all, since I'm not willing to disclose the gory details of our protracted breakup or the motes of affection that made the hardest words seem tender, because I am a sentimental couche-tard. I am as gummy-eyed as a Precious Moments drawing; thinking of foie gras production makes me teary. I get all riled up thinking about lost things, just because they are lost. Taking out the garbage is an everyday tragedy because of that.

Not sure why I'm writing this now. There's my 1970 Pontiac Firebird. The car I always wanted and now I have it. I rule!

Best word from last night

FECUNDITY, for so few points that I can't even bear to recall it.

I guess the fact that I'm lackadaisically posting about Scrabble gambits tells a lot about what I am (or am not) doing in my life.

April showers bring May doldrums: reading classic screenplays at work for fun, trying not to let cramps kill me, eating Chinese eggplant by the bucket, idling about. Also, lying: "Spiderman 2" doesn't count as a "classic screenplay." Ffffbbbt. Gaaaahhh

A better bingo

Credit where credit is due. Al played the best two consecutive Scrabble plays to date:

1) FRUITION: a bingo for 66 points
2) QUARK: with a triple letter and double word score, 58 points.

I still won.

Best Scrabble word ever?

CANOODLED.

Alas, for only 33 points.

I guess using two blank tiles to make the word doesn't help.

It doesn't even come close to Laura's winner last year: REZONING.

Bingo with a triple letter score. 68 points.

Shit.

The Case Against Marriage

A friend of mine recently got hitched, not for romantic love or money, but for friend love. What do I mean? She wanted her friend X to be in a place where he could be happy and financially secure. X had found such a place: America!

But there was a slight problem: X was not American. So my friend and X traveled back to X's country, got married, and moved back to America, where X could continue to pursue his American dream with his girlfriend (not my friend) without fear of deportation. There was no money, duress, or pressure involved; all my friend got out of this marriage was a few hundred international bureaucratic loopholes to navigate and a loud wedding in an EU country.

My friend and X will have to stay together for three years before X will be granted permanent residency. At that point, they are free to divorce. Before that point, the INS will badger my married friend and her legal husband to prove their love for one another. They'll have to show pictures of them recreating together--the longer ago the pictures were taken and the more affection their poses in the picture, the better. They'll have to submit to a series of humiliating questions about each other, designed to entrap them into betraying their ignorance about each other's habits (and therefore betraying, presumably, their immigration fraud). They may have to do obligatory "couple" things--living at the same address, opening accounts together, etc. All of these charades just to convince the INS that they are in a truly committed relationship to one another.

I'm thinking about this. At what point--short of my friend writing "I have married X solely for the purpose of giving him U.S. citizenship"--will the INS definitively say that an international marriage was immigration fraud? If my friend does not know which toothpaste brand her husband prefers, wouldn't an American wife of an American husband be excused for not knowing the same thing? If the INS found out that X was actually dating another woman, couldn't X point to the gazillions of American husbands who carry out extramarital affairs? If my friend had taken money for the marriage, can't my friend just say that plenty of husbands give their wives gifts? I'm not certain where the boundary falls between a marriage like my friend and X's and a "real marriage" like the kind that millions of stupid, incompetent, ugly, boorish, haggard, artificial, creepy American breeders have.

I mean, marriage is a juridical relationship, right? Married couples in which both spouses are American never have onus to prove their commitment to one another in the same way that married international couples have to prove. Would the INS declare an American marriage null and void if Dick and Jane couldn't produce pictures of themselves in front of Epcot Center smiling at a camera because they would rather stick golf tees into each other's philandering eyes than be forced to spend any time together? Or if Dick didn't live in the same state as Jane?

Of course not. So not only do we have a system of marriage that flat-out excludes people who love people of the same sex, but within this system there is a hierarchy of partnerships. Some partnerships can be purely juridical--the partnership of an American man and an American woman--with no romantic love whatsoever. Other partnerships, on the other hand--between an American and a non-American--must prove affection, commitment, feelgood, and lovingkindness.

I can understand if the government wants to prevent real marriage fraud, like the woman who married 27 non-Americans for money. But what's wrong with an unmarried American marrying one unmarried non-American, even if there is the exchange of cash? Can't you just call that a dowry? Isn't that what a diamond engagement ring is?

Somebody who wants to explain this two-tiered marriage system to me is welcome to do so.

Meanwhile, I think this just exposes marriage for the bullshit that it is. I'm thinking of starting a movement against civil marriage--no one should have it. Marriage, if the Christians are so concerned about preserving it, should be purely sectarian. The state should have no interest in regulating "romantic" relationships. In the place of civil marriage ought to be domestic partner registries for all people--het couples, queer couples, two elderly friends who live together to save on expenses, a widow and her best friend, three adult siblings living together and raising one of the sibling's children from a previous marriage--so that the government could give appropriate tax breaks and benefits to the real family units that constitute American society. This is the correct rejoinder to all the crows on the right who fear that gay marriage will lead to polyamory and incest: families are about mutual support and caregiving, not the romantic feelings of penises housed in vaginas. All families should be recognized--and yes, including those families that include more than two heads of household or siblings, as in the cases mentioned above--not just those that churches recognize.

(This from a woman who will be not-so-legally wed to her same-sex stick in three months. Don't get it wrong: it's not about the marriage. It's about the big ol' party that follows it.)

More stupid ways to waste time

Blogthings - Your Linguistic Profile: "

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

25% Yankee

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

"

"Do you sodomize your wife?"

The Nation | Comment | Debriefing Scalia

What cojones!

Justice Antonin Scalia got more than he bargained for when he accepted the NYU Annual Survey of American Law's invitation to engage students in a Q&A session. Randomly selected to attend the limited-seating and closed-to-the-press event, NYU law school student Eric Berndt asked Scalia to explain his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and struck down the nation's sodomy laws. Not satisfied with Scalia's answer, Berndt asked the Justice, "Do you sodomize your wife?" Scalia demurred and law school administrators promptly turned off Berndt's microphone. As Berndt explains in his post to fellow law school students, it was an entirely fair question to pose to a Justice whose opinion--had it been in the majority--would have allowed the state to ask that same question to thousands of gays and lesbians, and to punish them if the answer is yes.

Real Estate Dreams

J is just about to leave New York, but the day before her departure, I find her sitting at my kitchen table. It is a huge, medieval ten-seater oval table, much like the ones that encourage interaction between strangers at Le Pain Quotidien. Her posture suggests lamentation, but there is a tenor in the air around her that suggests hope. She is reading a card. It is an invitation from her mother to the annual garden party of some society whose name I cannot clearly discern. On the invitation her mother’s name is written in at least two ways: her email address is nancyckurtz@yahoo.com but her name is Nancy C. Kovash. Much later in the dream, I ask J about this discrepancy, and J says that both are correct ways to refer to her mother. J says she is saying. “What do you mean, staying?” I ask, in surprise. I’m holding back the effusion of delight until my hopes have been confirmed. She says, I found a place here. Someone offered me something. It’s real cheap, compared to this place. In my head I say, “But you aren’t paying rent!” but my mouth doesn’t make a sound. I’m just so happy she’s staying.

Laura and I go to the garden party together. There are many hundreds of people walking around what seems like the lead-up to the Taj Mahal. That is, there are no marble onion domes, but there are manicured lawns surrounding deep pools. Everything is not as pretty, however; the lawns are overwatered and muddy and the pools are crudely dug with steep sides with no supports keeping the banks from sliding into the water. It seems like the right thing to do is to encircle the pools with a long, slow walk, as everyone else crowds around the massive potluck table for a chance at fruit salad and beef shreds. God only knows what’s actually be served. I walk with Laura, picking my way through the crowd. J is in front of us, but she is talking with someone else—Alexandra? Lexi? Beth?—and doesn’t give us much of her time.

Finally, I catch up with her and say, “Hey, J, where’s your new apartment?” She says it’s not so close to us. “Where?” I ask. On 117th Street, she says. “We’re neighbors!” I exclaim, full of delight. Well, 92-23 117th Street, halfway in Harlem. Not too far.

I am so happy for her because she is going to live in New York. I envision her rise to prominence, fame, riches in the city. She hints at having another invitation card, this one not from her mother, but from a big shot who has important things to tell her.

She describes the apartment to me it and it seems to have long wooden struts holding up the windows and extremely tall ceilings, and it gets lot of light but it comes in concentrated slanted shafts through the windows. The light hits the floor of the apartment in perfect rectangles. It sounds like a cloister. I start talking to Laura about getting a new place a little further north in Harlem. “We’ll get a three bedroom for $2500—no, for $2000—then rent out one of the extra rooms for $800, then pay $1200 for two of us!” Laura rolls her eyes and discounts my suggestion. J takes off ahead of us, but I keep my eye on her.

We finally circumscribe the pools and are ready to eat. Laura and I approach the potluck table. The spread is huge, constituting about a hundred individual steam trays and deep baking pans, but somewhat disgusting. I go nowhere near the entrée dishes, the pastas and meats that have mostly been picked clean anyway. I head to the fruit salads while Laura attempts to spoon some pasta onto her plate. I look over and she is laughing maniacally at her seat at a picnic table. I go over and hiss a warning to her about her looking like a fool, and she shoots me a dirty glance. “What’s so funny?” I say. She is laughing at her pasta, which has retained the shape of the Tupperware container it was poured out from, and now looks like a small, perfect hillock on her paper plate. I find this embarrassing and not funny, so I take my partitioned plastic plate over to the fruits and segregate the honeydew, cantaloupe, and strawberries on my plate by color. I come back and eat.

J comes over to us and tells us that this party isn’t as awkward as the other garden parties for this society that she has been to. She says there is usually a lot more cheek pinching, and she feels more grown-up now. I am hungry for scraps and I like to hear her speak with confidence. There’s a moment that suggests an impasse, but it passes and we all clean our plates with mechanical efficiency. Someone suggests going back for seconds, but at that moment, Boo presses his nose into my face and wakes me up from my twitching sleep. No more dreams for me.

Eh, a dull blog post, and a non-licentious dream. Next time: my X-rated dreams of Michael J. Fox's couch, circa 1986; my R-rated dreams about climbing ladders to bookshelves; my PG-13 dreams about leaving a good kisser on a bad Perugian bus; my PG dreams about coconut husks;, and my G-rated dreams about my dog turning into a trout. Beheadings, amputations, and open-mouthed kissing...stay tuned.

Spanish Parliament Gives Approval to Bill to Legalize Same-Sex Marriages

The New York Times > International > Europe > Gay Unions: Spanish Parliament Gives Approval to Bill to Legalize Same-Sex Marriages

Benny Sechzehn's response: "Iniquitous."

Benny Sechzehn was a notsie!!

Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth - Sunday Times - Times Online

Hopeful no longer, the newly appointed pope participated in the Hitler Youth program. Sure it was compulsory, but this gets into questions of complicity with oppressive regimes, right? At the very least, why isn't this more publicized? Yeesh.

Buffalo Ann Bill Coulter

I had to think about genocide to stop myself from giggling maniacally over this photo at work.

It puts the lotion in the basket!

Amy O. is a genius

For finding and forwarding this link from her ancestral Latvian homeland to me.


Latvian Photoshopping

When is a fin not a fin?

When it is a "dol-phin."

Is that supposed to pass as a joke? I'm sorely disappointed in the jokes that come on my popsicle sticks. (The popsicles themselves: cream of the crop!) (Plus--whoo! It's popsicle season again! Time to turn my urine red with Red #5!) Another stupid joke: "Q: Where do bunnies save their computer files?" "A: On "hoppy" disks!" But why not "floppy disks," since bunnies are known for their floppy as much as they are known for their hoppy? What utter bullshit.

And then I write a blog entry overflows the special cup I reserve for self-hatred. Wasting your time and mine, Amy O.

I'm sitting here getting all sentimental because I had too much alcohol over the last few days. It's really making me miss 1999, when I was a really big twat to almost everyone I loved. I'm also missing 1987, when I ought to have accepted the Fudgsicle that Erin Norcia offered me; politesse required otherwise but I periodically think of that Fudgsicle and curse politesse. I'm also a reserving a seat at the table for 1991, 1996, and 2002. Can anyone offer an alternative plot to "About Schmidt"? I'm writing a short story that is inadvertantly turning into an "old white man takes a detour" narrative. This is so shitty. Sorry.

"The Jamie strugleing with her arms."

Also, since I know at least one loyal reader who has too much time on her "graduate student of American labor history at Columbia University" hands, I thought I would throw this delectable link into my blogspace.

Furry porn, written by someone who has not yet discovered the spellcheck function in word processing programs. These brilliant stories never cease to thrill large parties full of grammar nerds. Try reading one of them aloud.

I discovered them last year when I tried to Google "furry buttocks" and accidentally Googled "furry butocks" instead.

KPFK

Also, yay! I was interviewed on KPFK (Pacifica in Los Angeles) for that goddamn report that just won't go away! Whoo! Much to my delight, I managed to sound less like an idiot than like an imbecile. Thanks to the rondure of the earth, the interview had to happen at 11pm, 8pm Pacific time. I studiously avoided saying "nipple licking," since I know that is a phonetic combination that has troubled my immigrant tongue more than once.

Unfortunately for you, KPFK only does live streaming and doesn't archive any of its shows online. But my sound guru of a girlfriend tapped her MiniDisc into my computer and we may post the recording online soon. Keep your jaundiced fingers crossed.

Oprah Winfrey

A few years ago, my favorite facetious way to answer questions about my future career was to say that I wanted to be Oprah Winfrey. (Eventually this gave over to wanting to be Ted Turner, but then Jane Fonda seemed so chameleonic and insecure, and Atlanta seemed like such an unpleasant place to live, so I went back to wanting to be Oprah.) I mistakenly signed myself up for a year of free Time magazine (I wanted National Geographic, fuckers!) when I signed up for the NYC Ford Triathlon, which promises to be a meaty mouthful of Hudson brownwater, which makes this sentence so digressive that I can't even finish it.

So Time magazine reports that Oprah is one of the "100 most influential people in the world." It's hard to put much stock in a magazine that nominates some NASCAR flunkie one of the most influential people in the world, but that doesn't stop me from believing that Oprah has assets of $1 billion. Or believing that Oprah is one of the world's most influential people. I believe in the Oprah myth. The musky scent of the Oprah mystique stimulates my salivary glands. Oprah says jump, I say, "How high?" Oprah says jump again, and I round up all my friends and we all jump in unison. Oprah, the pandemic.

Ain't nothing wrong with that. I don't even watch her show, and haven't since that sad summer of 1993 when I had nothing to do but execute disc-slipping sit-ups in front of the television between trips to the A-1 Liquors to beat Street Fighter II in 25 minutes as Blanka and twenty minutes as Guile, when I watched Jerry Springer quite fanatically and Oprah less for the entertainment than for the promise of filling in the hourlong vacuum between Darkwing Duck re-runs and Roseanne re-runs. But I knew even in 1992 that Oprah would one day be my Supreme Leader and Commander.

She's slow in spreading her tentacles but steadfast. Tonight, after watching one vaguely entertaining show in which five flat-tummied youth put live beetles in their mouths, and one voyeuristic fly-on-the-wall dating show, I tuned in to Oprah to see how my emotions could be jerked around at 2 o'clock in the morning.

The answer: very crudely, and very much!

She was having a show about people who had accidentally killed their or other people's loved ones: a man who leaves a car running in the garage and aphyxiates his sleeping wife, a man who shot his son because he mistook him for an intruder, a woman who runs over an 11 year-old girl. Oprah furrowed her brow appropriately and the audience alternated between sniffles and silence. Dutifully, I opened my eyes and poured myself forth. Lolo was fast asleep in a puddle of drool, so I clutched her passionately and furrowed my brow with worried intent. Lolo turned over and continued to sleep. I lay in bed worrying, and realized, not without some triumph, that I had become exactly like my dad.

Oprah ended the show with some anodynes and I turned off the television. My pathetic mewling ("Oprah made me cry") failed to wake Lolo, so instead I am writing all about it here.

Oprah made me cry.

Thank you, Oprah Winfrey!

Mein PMS

I'm happy to note that a nine-question personality test reveals me to be more similar to

the Fuhrer than any other world leader.

What Famous Leader Are You?

This week is so far better than last, thanks to a new infusion of vitamin D and a Trivial Pursuit game that finally confirmed a decade-long belief: bananas are berries. Also: Cambodia.

Life is full of shitty little mysteries!

No money, no mas.

Another nadir in this godawful week (new couch won't fit into apartment, i humiliated myself in front of others, I quit my job, my dog is vomiting and sad, I am currently sitting in a puddle): not getting a $100,000 scholarship that I had hoped would carry me until my $32,000/year public interest lawyer job could start. Hooray, debt! Suddenly "devotion to the public interest" seems like a mouthful of cavities and "$150,000/year job at Shearman and Sterling" seems like a good dentist. I'm such an asshole.

Trying not to cry to the woman rejecting me by phone was also a good feeling, as was punching the security gate and spraining something in my hand.

Then my dad sent me this email:

mandy , my dear,
love you, don't feel good. ( you have to pay back it anyway!)
nothing can change the way that you want to challenge the world
the enjoy of the study is way worth of the money,
except that the dollar power reduced to half since 4 years ago (
house price almost doubled in four years)
so hurry up, before the perishing opportunity.

love you

Dad.

Anyone who can prise meaning from this gets a cookie. What is he saying?

I'm being a baby. Not getting money that one never deserved to get isn't really on the scale of say, the death of one's spiritual leader or the death of a person in a persistent vegetative state or the memo created by Mel Martinez("'s legal counsel") addressing how the GOP could best manipulate the death of a person in a persistent vegetative state for political gain. Mild depression is only worsened when you recognize the cause of your mild depression to be so petty and privileged.

Onward and upward, I guess. Now my zeal to craft a winning action/comedy screenplay for The Rock has been renewed, as has my interest in being a contestant on a reality show where for minimal ingestion of disturbing substances or momentary endurance of cockroach-filled coffins one can win enough money to pay off the interest on a month of tuition debt. If anyone has any get rich quick schemes they would like to float my way, please remember: I'm a total sucker for you! Send me anything remotely believable and I'll send you some of my non-profit "salary"!

Now if you'll excuse me, a man from Nigeria has emailed me asking for my help in propping up his country's ailing economy. Who am I to say no?

In absentia

Sorry I've been so derelict with the updates. I'm entering a stage of post-adolescent self-loathing/-doubt and am waiting for an upswing before pretending to be human again.