whiskey in a teacup . com

These helpful suggestions come directly from one of my favorite clients, who was so amused with himself that I, too, became verily amused:

1) [after intentionally running into a woman's legs with the wheelchair] “Oh, I’m sorry for accidentally running into you. We should exchange phone numbers for insurance purposes.”

2) “My legs don’t work, but all my other parts do.”

Me: This mail I got from Social Security says that if I die, you get a one-time death benefit of $255. But if I bear you a child first, you get $895 every month.

Jared: Well, I know what I’m doing tonight.

So, the husband is out at some bar watching Area Sports Team hit balls with sticks. This means a) he won’t be home until quite late and b) the neighbors are probably watching the game on TV and will soon commence with their very manly shouting and cheering, lest anyone in the neighborhood question the size of their nuts. These factors combined mean that I will not be falling asleep anytime soon, which, after a two-week spell of sucky sleeping, is not great news for me.

Truth be told, you could eliminate factor B from the previous paragraph and I’d still be up all night. I can’t sleep when I’m alone in the house, because I am a gigantic pansy. It’s weird. As I like to say, I don’t believe in god, ghosts, or the tooth fairy. I have absolutely no belief in anything supernatural or otherworldly. Yet when it’s dark outside and I’m by myself, all I can think of is: what if I were to turn around and suddenly someone or something was standing there? What if I felt an unseen hand on my back, or the door opened by itself? It’s not that I think this is a remote possibility. It’s the “what if” that gets me, because that “if” would be so horrific and unbearable that when I let my imagination go there, I thoroughly freak myself out. And because I am anxious by nature, once I start thinking this way I cannot stop, and I torture and terrify myself until Jared comes home or I simply pass out from exhaustion.

I often tell Jared about these fears of mine, and he’ll say things like “But the doors are locked; you’re safe” which misses the point entirely. Locks can’t keep out that which doesn’t exist. I recognize and admit that my fear is illogical and juvenile, but I’ll be damned if there’s anything I can do about it.

Meanwhile, we tivo’d Hellraiser yesterday and I’ve never seen it and I wonder if I dare watch it to pass the time. It could be like a rite of passage! Or it could contain the frightening themes and images that finally turn me catatonic with fear. One never knows.

I got my hair cut on Friday, and the stylist was very friendly and talkative, much brighter and more amiable than average. While she was blow-drying my hair, she casually asked me if I was dating anyone. When I responded, “Actually, I’m married,” she was rendered so stunned that she turned off the dryer with a dramatic flourish and gasped. “WHAT. That blows my mind! You look like you’re about twenty!” This was amusing in several ways: 1) Her appraisal of my apparent age was a bit of a non-sequitur. 2) When I was in my late teens people used to go into similar states of shock over the fact that I wasn’t in my mid-twenties. 3) Some minutes prior she had complimented me on something, and when I thanked her she said something like, “Don’t worry, I’m not hitting on you. I’m married!” Suffice to say, we both chuckled verily. Later, she ironed my hair, and even though I frequently iron it myself and find the activity quite boring, I find it intensely pleasurable to have it ironed by someone else. Even better, she actually cut it the way I wanted. I tipped her 25%.

(Side note: during the past year, my age has been estimated by acquaintances to be as low as sixteen. This is very distressing to me, even though I will be twenty-five in a few months and fear this will herald my inevitable downward spiral into busted old hagdom. Time will tell.)

Since I’m too tired to come up with content of my own, here are some links to other stuff you may (and should!) enjoy:

This video is a collaboration between two of my buddies from the boroughs: Ash, who is in film school, and Zulfiqar, whose lower body has always dreamed of being in movies. I think it’s cool.

My pal Travis just launched his second business, HeavyInk, where you can buy comics on the cheap and also get recommendations for other titles you might like. I’m not really into comics (which is shocking considering my MUDing past), but I will definitely be checking this out, and encourage you to do the same.

This article details the experiences of a guy who grew a Hitler mustache as a social experiment.

This site contains the archives of The Weekly Week, a defunct Boston newspaper written in the satirical style of The Onion, but better. I became aware of it while peeing (as you do) at the local cafe; the owners were involved in the newspaper and have plastered its pages all over the bathroom walls. This is a photo of one of the headlines which made me laugh quite heartily. I’m not sure if it would have made me laugh until I peed because I was already peeing when I read it, but I sure think it’s funny.

This is my twitter in case any of y’all have it (which you don’t, because I’ve used the “find friends via your email contact list” and none of your asses came up). I dig it, but when very few of your friends use it, it sort of sucks. So use it.

Maybe it’s old meme, but yesterday was the first time I went to this site and clicked on “watch the video”.  It’s really quite breathtaking.

I studied for a while this afternoon and evening at the aforementioned neighborhood cafe.  During this time, many songs were played from an employee’s ipod over the speakers.  One song, by a band I didn’t recognize, was so pretty that I felt like I should have been having my first kiss while riding a unicorn over a waterfall made of rainbows, or some shit.  I had to put my notebook down.  During another track, a sixties love song, a girl sitting near me started serenading her boyfriend along to the lyrics, and when I glanced at her she looked very much in love.  That scene made me vaguely uncomfortable because I had seen her boyfriend around town once or twice before, and he had flirted with me, and seeing them together made me wonder if he had been dating her at the time.  Yet another song prompted one of the employees to ask her co-worker if he ever felt like they were characters on a popular Gen-Y tv show.  He responded by locating the ipod and skipping to the next track.

On my most recent trip to Harvard Square, my whole world went topsy-turvy when I turned a corner and realized that Caffe Paradiso was no longer in existence. This was a fairly serious blow for me, as Paradiso was essentially my favorite place. Not just my favorite coffeeshop or favorite spot in town, but my favorite place, full stop; a small establishment that became so precious to me over the years that it took up a massive amount of real estate in my heart and memories.

I started going there when I was seventeen and taking night classes at Harvard. I would take the train in and hang out there before and after my classes several times a week, or sometimes every night. The cappuccino was often bitter, and the music annoying, but somehow the place became a constant in my life. There was no attitude or pretension, but instead old-world charm and a truly choice vantage point for staring out the window and daydreaming or people-watching. Soon I moved closer to the city and could get there by bus in about twenty minutes, and the relationship deepened: I would spend hours there, listening to my headphones (Modern Lovers, Tom Waits) and watching the snow fall outside, or reading the Sunday paper on a summer morning. One of the girls who worked behind the counter gave me a free plastic mug, which leaks when filled with tea but which I will never throw out. I always took dates there, and I always introduced them to the owner, Oscar, who would kiss me on both cheeks whenever he saw me.

Which brings me to the saddest element of this already woeful tale. When I saw that Paradiso was gone, I went home and emailed my friend (who I met, of course, at Paradiso) who has lived in Harvard Square for decades and spent exponentially more time at the cafe than I did. He told me that not only was the cafe closed, but Oscar had died. Our home was gone, and so was the man who built it! Cruel stuff to take in so unexpectedly, and all the more jarring because although my patronage has decreased sharply over the years, I knew Paradiso could never be replaced.

Today, however, the void left behind was rendered slightly less gaping by an exciting discovery: a great cafe in our new neighborhood. When we moved in I bemoaned the lack of a convenient study spot; a short walk into the next square, or bus ride into Cambridge, provide ample coffeeshops and sandwich shops, but I had not been able to locate one in our immediate vicinity. A happy bit of happenstance changed all that when I discovered the bright, comfortable haunt right down the street, somehow overlooked until now, that housed me and my studies (and Julia, who is also a short walk away) for a few hours this afternoon and surely will again.

I am still traumatized by the fall of Paradiso, but today on the chilly walk back from my new hang-out, caffeine in my veins and my notebooks in hand, I was exceedingly content.

Today I saw an SUV hit, run over, and subsequently drag a shopping cart through a parking lot.  It was even more special than it sounds.

I had two separate and equally disturbing instances of social interaction last weekend. The first was at a friend’s going-away party on Friday, which took place at a lounge, where I was introduced to a guy who works at a company I left a few years ago. We chatted a little about the business and then he took the reins of the conversation and galloped wildly into some insane, apropos-of-nothing topics. Here are some selected things he said to me:

“Oh, you’re a nurse? My ex was a nurse. One time she was driving her car to work and ended up pulling a gun on this guy, and yada yada yada, I sent her home to Montana.”

“So I was visiting this customer of ours, and I already knew the guys who work there because they made my tombstone.” Me: “You…already have a tombstone?” He: “Yeah, I was supposed to die a while back.”

“Yeah, those guys at [company he works for where I used to work] don’t know me. They don’t know how fucking crazy I really am. They’ll find out someday.”

He also managed to hurl some very random and unnecessary insults my way, at which point I informed him that I would be going over there now, and that was pretty much that. (Later, at the same lounge, a woman I had just met grabbed my hand to inspect my wedding ring, and upon finding a small moonstone instead of a diamond, wordlessly dropped my hand and went to talk to someone else. People are awesome, which is why I try to be around them as much as possible.)

The other incident occurred in the bathroom of a bar some friends took me to after dinner on Saturday. The two bathroom stalls were occupied, so I was standing in the very cramped area by the sink when another girl entered the room and squished alongside me.

“Someone pooped on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom,” she said, “so I came down here.” I muttered something about how nasty and improbable that was, at which point the girl in one of the stalls shrieked, “Something’s dripping on me in here!” We all looked towards the ceiling, from which a decidedly brown liquid was indeed dripping. The drippee struggled to finish her business and escape the foulness that rained down upon her, while those of us who were still waiting to pee weighed our options re: which bathroom was more disgusting, the one with shit on the seat, or the one with what very well could have been shit falling from the ceiling?

I’m not saying I didn’t have fun this weekend, because I did, but sometimes life really is like a bad sitcom, except it lasts much, much longer than twenty-two minutes.