whiskey in a teacup . com

A friend left me a voicemail last night, just checking in to say hello.  She said, somewhat jokingly, “I was hoping to catch you, but since it’s Saturday night, you’re probably out paaaartying!”

In fact, I was sitting on the couch in my pj’s, eating pizza, drinking beer, and watching This Is Spinal Tap…which I suppose is pretty much my version of partying.

Last night I had the displeasure of viewing one in a series of ads by a hamburger conglomerate that supposedly stopped selling its most prized and vile burger option for a day to elicit consumer reactions. I am always wary when commercials allege to contain footage from hidden cameras, that these are “real” reactions, but let us suppose they are. Some versions of the ads show people smiling in disbelief, feigning physical pain over the loss of their desired shit sandwich; some show people waxing poetic about memories of enjoying the food. Other versions depict people behaving in what can only be described as nasty, abusive, horrible ways towards the cashiers at the counters and drive-throughs. This is supposed to be funny, and make us realize how empty our lives would be without this particular brand of fast food, but instead it reveals something truly disappointing about our fellow humans. Watching the ads makes me acutely uncomfortable and only adds to my conviction that hell is indeed other people.

Short of mass-murderers and rapists, there is perhaps no worse kind of person than he who is cruel and self-righteous towards cashiers, customer service reps, and other innocent harbingers of bad news. I have been at the receiving end of various forms of bureaucratic nonsense, and have always consciously refrained from taking my ire out on the person on the other end of the telephone line. It’s not out of pity or fear of confrontation, but out of respect for the fact that for whatever reason, this person is working a shitty job for shitty pay and in all likelihood did not cause my problem and is only trying to help me solve it, and adding more ugliness to the world by yelling at him or her hurts us both. It just isn’t right; it just isn’t decent. Failure to recognize this universal truth and to behave accordingly is evidence of a truly corrupt personality, one that would berate the kid at the grocery store because your coupon for Hot Pockets has expired, one that would demand to speak to a manager because the cash register overcharged you thirty cents, one that would rage against the dying of a triple-decker hamburger and make everyone around oneself embarrassed and miserable in the process.

On our way back from visiting family for the “holidays” this week, we pulled up to a rest stop to refuel the car and ourselves. I was standing in line at a Ubiquitous Pretentious Coffeeshop when an incident–nay, a crisis–nay, a veritable disaster erupted several patrons ahead of me. Some shameless old bag had tried to use a giftcard issued by Ubiquitous Pretentious Coffeeshop to purchase her Ubiquitous Pretentious Coffee, but the computer systems were down and the card wasn’t working. She whipped out her cell phone, located the customer service number on the back of the card, and without leaving her place in line or making any overtures towards decency or humanity, started barking into the phone that I AM STANDING ON THE NEW YORK INTERSTATE (oh, if only!) and THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I HAVE TRIED TO USE THIS CARD and I DON’T CARE THAT YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEMS ARE DOWN, I WANT MY COFFEE!

It occurred to me, and perhaps to everyone else subjected to this disgusting display of selfishness and misplaced fury, to offer to buy her coffee in exchange for the immediate closure of her fat, stupid mouth. Instead, we all watched in solemn discomfort as she handed her phone to the cashier, who shortly thereafter handed it back and apologized, explaining that the computers were down and the card would work tomorrow and there’s nothing we can do for you right now. With the righteous indignation that can only be demonstrated by a person of truly low character, the woman declared that NO ONE I KNOW WILL EVER COME HERE AGAIN and stomped away, presumably to the next insurmountable affront to her rights as a human being.

Perhaps she was having a bad day in a series of bad days; perhaps she was struggling with illness or personal strife. Perhaps she was too old and ignorant to understand that when the system is down, mere rage cannot resurrect it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on her, but I can honestly state that this was one of the worst infractions of its type I have seen in some time. The only story that compares to it is one that happened to my friend and former co-worker when we were both working at a construction supply company years ago. A flashily-dressed young woman (jewel-encrusted cell phone, designer bag, etc) had come in looking for field books but had no actual information about which one she needed. My friend was trying to help her sort through the dozens of varieties we offered when the woman lost her patience and, in the most condescending possible tone, asked, “Did you go to school for this?”

I still tease that friend about her PhD in Fieldbookology, and we still laugh about the incident, and I’d like to think it’s those encounters with complete bitches and assholes that helped make us the nice people we are today.

Driving up to Jared’s hometown yesterday, I mentioned that it might be nice to take a walk around the neighborhood at some point during our stay. He replied half-jokingly that it was too dangerous, as his mother’s quiet street is surrounded on all sides by much sketchier streets. I asked him why, if it was such a violent city, it was safe to leave the door to the house unlocked, and why he sometimes suggests that we should move up here to raise a family. He couldn’t really explain it to me, and when I posed the same question to his mother later, she said the people who lived adjacent to her house were looking out for her.

In hearing stories of how close-knit Jared and his family are with their neighbors, and in noting Jared’s general paradigm of anticipating that all things in life will work out if you’re a reasonable and decent person, I realized that this neighborhood is four hundred miles from where I grew up and about a million miles away from how I grew up. A few years ago someone was shot execution-style across the street from here, probably over a drug deal gone bad. Jared’s mom heard the gunshot. She had described this with a shrug–it happened, but it’s over now–and I was amazed at how little it affected her. Around here, people get murdered once in a while, but for the most part no one worries it will happen to them because they stay off the bad streets and away from the bad crowds, and you can always rely on your neighbor to check in to make sure you’re ok.

In my hometown (and my household in particular), there wasn’t much sense of connection to the community. It was an exceedingly safe place to grow up; I think someone had been raped a few blocks away some years ago, which was big news! From the age of six I walked to and from school alone. There was no visible crime, but those people on the other block think we hide money in our walls because we’re Jews, and the guy who lives in that house is a skinhead but he fixed our sink once when it was broken. The man across the street drives a junky old mail truck and shovels the snow from his lawn into the street in front of our house; he’s crazy. We keep to ourselves. We have no empirical reason to think that anything bad will happen to us, but we dislike our neighbors and they dislike us and we fear just about everything although things like that don’t happen here.

With eighteen years of that kind of senseless small-town anxiety built into my character, it’s a wonder Jared’s tales of murder and mayhem haven’t put me into a catatonic state. It’s funny, but I feel pretty much at ease here, and I still want to take that walk around the neighborhood.

We are living in icy times, and though my particular city has done a good job of clearing the streets, the sidewalks are somewhat problematic. The fraction-of-a-mile trip to the coffeshop this evening was filled with uncertainty and brief, exciting moments of terror. My fellow pedestrians and I toddled slowly, with awkwardly wide gaits, looking for frozen footholds into which a boot could be thrust to propel oneself over a pile of slush. In some places there were slick and uneven walkways; in others a snowbank obstructed one’s way completely, and we had to divert our paths onto the wet streets, making desperate eye contact with motorists. At one point in my trip, a man made a dramatic chivalric gesture to allow me access to a small inlet that put me back onto dry, sure footing. Several times one leg would unexpectedly glide ahead of my body, and though I stopped short of windmilling, I had to employ similarly embarrassing maneuvers to stay upright.

People put up a mighty fuss about the weather in New England, but I for one enjoy the challenge.

It can be difficult to pick a favorite something out of an amorphous list of many somethings that one loves, but for all practical purposes, Annie Hall is my favorite movie. The original title of the movie was Anhedonia, which was rejected for marketing reasons. Someone has resurrected that title and made an art project using the audio from the movie overlaid onto a constantly changing series of video clips; it’s a silly gimmick, but for the first few minutes, it’s actually somewhat poignant. If you are anything like me–the type who, when asked to describe herself in four words would choose “Woody Allen with tits” every time–then I suggest you check it out!

You’ll have to excuse me if my intelligibility dips below acceptable levels; I am inconceivably tired but also sick of neglecting my blog and depriving the world (i.e. all three of you!) of my fantastic inner workings.

Last night Jared and I went to see No Country For Old Men, which I wanted to see it solely because Javier Bardem was in it. The only other film I have seen Bardem in is The Sea Inside, which we saw a few months ago. That was an astoundingly well-told story about a man who becomes paralyzed and, some decades later, assembles a group of friends to help him kill himself. Bardem plays an old man for most of the movie, and until some brief flashback scenes of his character earlier in life, I had no inkling that he (the actor) was not elderly. Similarly, when I watched him in No Country, he seemed to take up about three times as much physical space as he did in The Sea, and his voice and eyes were entirely different. That, to me, is what makes a good actor: complete immersion in a charcter, the ability to leave out one’s personal tics and mannerisms. So anyway, I thought he was neat and I enjoyed the movie.

My favorite thing to do after watching a movie is to go on imdb.com or read published reviews to see what other people thought. In so doing I came across this review and was immediately disgusted. The reviewer doesn’t like the movie, he doesn’t get it, whatever; that’s not what I take issue with. It’s this load of maggot-infested feces, about the movie’s directors and their treatment of the source material:

“They even manage to acknowledge briefly the relevance of all this mayhem to the present occupation of Iraq (albeit somewhat anachronistically, as the action is set in 1980). At one point, [a character] ruefully reflects to a colleague, “It’s just all-out war—there isn’t any other word for it,” and goes on to comment about the sad times we’re living in, when some people even resort to senseless torture, making particular allusion to Abu Ghraib by mentioning a torturer placing a dog collar around the neck of one of his victims.”

This is a common meme in the world of morons: the insistence to link every fucking thing that happens in the media and in your personal life to whatever war happens to be on at the time. This movie didn’t have a single thing to do with the Iraq war, or with any war; it’s a violent movie, and war is violent, but that’s where the connection ends. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people try to describe popular media as “an escape from these turbulent times” or “a response to the conflict overseas”. The vast majority of us aren’t at war, don’t have loved ones who are at war, and are not actually affected by the current war any more than we’re affected by every other atrocity that goes on in the world every day. The journalists and academics and others who have been perpetuating this kind of pseudo-intellectual garbage since the beginning of time would be well-advised to experience something -anything- on its own merit and not purely as a response to that day’s headlines.

It’s one thing to make a passing mention of politics when describing why Dylan’s music became so popular in the sixties…it’s another thing to take your morning dump and then expound upon how constipated you’ve become in this post-9/11 world.

Last night was the first night of Chanukah. I couldn’t find my menorah, but I knew it was in a box or bin somewhere and had simply never been unpacked since we moved into the condo. My search began in the basement, whose many boxes yielded no results. So I rifled through the frigid darkness of the garage, and went back inside and looked through the closets. I re-looked in places I had already looked. When I had officially searched everywhere, I started to freak out and maybe even cried a little, because I have been overwhelmed lately and I just wanted a pleasant fucking first night of Chanukah. Jared sensed my impending rage and, within seconds, magically produced the menorah. We lit the candles, and then he gave me a stuffed kidney. Happiness was restored, and all was well.

Tonight Soon I’m making latkes! Happy Chanukah, folks.

It is, in fact, possible to make an edible pizza with shredded cheddar cheese in lieu of mozzarella.  No one’s saying it’s ideal, or that you wouldn’t have preferred to just get delivery or eat something else entirely…we’re just saying it’s possible.