whiskey in a teacup . com

On Sunday afternoon, Jared and I were taking a leisurely stroll through our neighborhood.  At one point a car pulled up next to us, and the passenger asked for directions.  “That way,” I said, gesturing towards their desired location and accidentally smacking Jared right in the face.

Later, after visiting a coffeeshop from which I procured an espresso brownie in a small paper bag, we were walking down yet another street.  Apropos of nothing, I dropped the paper bag, which fell directly into Jared’s path and caused him to stumble dramatically.  He subsequently remarked that he never thought I’d be able to trip him with a brownie.  Yeah well.  He thought wrong!

While seated in the waiting area at an oil change shop this afternoon, I finally saw the much-balleyhooed Palin magazine cover in person.  My reactions were several:

1) Yeah, it’s a bit unflattering, but

2) mostly just because her makeup is garish…for an unretouched extreme close-up it’s a pretty damn decent photo

3) and let’s all chill out regarding her “unwanted facial hair”, because compared to this shiksa I’ve got a fu manchu, a unibrow, and a full set of mutton chops.  Compared to her I am a brunette Gossamer.  Chewbacca.  The missing link.  I could go on.   This sort of hysteria is how little girls grow up to be big girls with mild body dysmorphia, people.  Trust me!

The other day I caught Jared browsing Priceline to book arrangements for an upcoming business trip and I was all, “Dude, use Travelocity.”   They permanently won me as a customer with their current mascot/spokesman, a garden gnome who rushes to the scene of your fuxored travel plans and yells, “I’m here to enforce the guarantee!”  That shit is whimsical.  Priceline may have Shatner, but there’s just no competition here.  The gnome owns.

It occurs to me that my intense preference for gnome-based marketing is probably due to the 80’s cartoon The World of David the Gnome (based on the original Spanish version, “David el Gnomo”, itself based on the Dutch book “Die Kabouters”).  The show was not only fun, sweet, and atypically deep for a children’s cartoon, but also featured a superb, minor-chords-heavy theme song (Spanish version here) that always sort of reminded me of the Twin Peaks theme.

If that’s not a reason to choose one virtual travel agency over another, I don’t know what is.

So the global economy is sort of collapsing, except sort of not, and those of us in the middle class (i.e. me and pretty much everyone I know) don’t much know what to make of it.  In fact, until very recently, I counted myself among those who were totally unaffected by the crisis.  That all changed with one fell instant message, in which Jared informed me that his office’s holiday party has been canceled this year due to financial constraints.

Jared’s Office Holiday Party is something we live for all year round.  It’s a beautiful, magical event that involves things like the renting out of a ballroom in a fancy hotel in Harvard Square, free hotel rooms for every attendee, and such an endless, decadent, ridiculous supply of top-notch victuals and libations that you are pretty much guaranteed to need that free hotel room.  I very much dislike parties, especially parties where I don’t know most of the people, especially parties where everyone gets crazy drunk…but I love this party.  It cannot be explained; it just is.

It occurs to me that I never told the story of Jared’s Office Holiday Party Aught-Seven, which happened to fall on the same night as a friend’s wedding.  And it wasn’t just any friend’s wedding, but our friend Juju who is a delightful guy and whose bride-to-be was immigrating from Pakistan.  It was a very big deal.  But fortunately, the wedding ceremony was brief and in the evening, and the reception was to occur two days later (per Muslim custom), which meant we could go to the wedding and then go to the office party and not miss a moment of either.

On the big night, we obtained directions to the wedding venue (something called the Old State House), and from the venue back to the party.  We set out for the wedding, giddy with excitement for both our friend and our party.  We drove into Boston, expecting to wind up more or less downtown.  Instead, our directions lead us into Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, which, for those of you who don’t know, is pretty much the ghetto.   (Yeah, there are some nice parts, but let’s not split hairs here; it’s the frigging ghetto.)  “This doesn’t seem right,” we said.  “From the website, the wedding venue looked like an upscale place, and this is Dorchester…but then again, there are some nice parts.”  We arrived at the address and parked on the street.  There was nothing resembling an Old State House, but instead an actual shack covered in graffiti.  Something was definitely wrong.

I got out of the car, determined to ask a local for advice.  I noticed a man walking down the sidewalk in my general direction.  “Excuse me,” said I, “is there an Old State House around here?”  And I shit you not, when the man opened his mouth to reply that I was most definitely in the wrong part of town, I saw that he was wearing a full gold grill over his teeth.

Well, fuck.  By that point there was definitely no time to make it to wherever the Old State House actually was.  We made some frantic phone calls and found that some friends of ours were also running disgustingly late, but they were able to give us correct directions to the venue, which was not in Dorchester but in downtown Boston (which, no shit?  The Old State House is downtown?  Because we thought it was in fucking DORCHESTER).  We drove there as fast as we could, and made it there and parked and ran.  When we arrived at the venue, we dashed up to the second floor and saw:  our late-ass friends, who had made it there before us, a room full of people who appeared to be deep in prayer (many of whom had travelled all the way from Pakistan just to hear us creaking the floor boards as we interrupted the wedding), and our friend Juju with his incredibly beautiful bride, being pronounced husband and wife.

Well, we had totally fucked that up, but the wedding was over and there was nothing we could do about it, other than go to the Office Holiday Party and try to forget our woes.  So go we did, and we got there and ate amazing food and desserts and drank drinks.  Now, y’all who know me know that I do not dance.  But on this particular night, I not only danced, but I somehow wound up dancing with the singer of the live band while he sang “Brick House”.  I ended up hugging Jared’s boss (the CEO of the company), who later joined the band on lead guitar.  I ended up wearing a lei and eating sushi with my fingers while clinging to Jared, who was drinking out of a plastic coconut.  All in all, it was one of the more successful parties I’ve been to.

All year I’ve looked forward to experiencing that night once again, except with less “missing the most significant day of my friend’s life” and also less “wearing a quasi-gothic black dress to an island-themed party”, but let’s face it, with probably more “waking up in the hotel room in the middle of the night in abject misery, wanting nothing more than a swift and immediate death”.  But because a few people in high places were wicked dumb, I don’t get to re-live that unique joy.  Instead, I now have the night free to go to my office holiday party, which lacks swank hotel ballrooms and free gourmet food, but features a top-forty DJ and two drink tickets!

Hard times are definitely upon us, friends.

Good news, everyone!  I am the ecstatic owner of a new Universal Adaptaplug DC Power Cord.  You see, for the past year or so the power cord to my satellite radio has been busted.  (It’s the kind that plugs into the car’s cigarette lighter.)  I broke it one day while aimlessly fiddling with it (i.e. taking it apart, examining the little bits inside, and putting it back together), and since then it’s never been the same.  Whenever I drive over any sort of bump in the road, the radio shuts off.  When I take a right turn, the radio shuts off.  If I’m reaching for my water in the cup holder and lightly brush my hand against the power cord, the radio shuts off.

I deal with this by unplugging and replugging the cord about a dozen times per car ride, which somehow magically jiggers the internal bits back into position, and by occasionally taking it apart (again) and re-jiggering it manually.  There are days when I plug it in and just can’t get the radio to turn on at all, and I should mention here that I am not someone who is capable of driving without some kind of aural distraction.  This might sound infuriating, and indeed it is, and every time Jared rides in my car he wonders why I don’t just go to Radio Shack and get a new cord.  “Pfft,” I would say, “I always just fix it myself.  I’ve been doing it that way forever.  At this point I could fuckin’ Tony Stark that thing out of a tin can.”  Then I’d turn right and the radio would shut off and I would cry tears of bitter, bitter rage.

But I put a stop to all that today, when I decided that it was finally time to visit Radio Shack.  (Just because I drive past one every day on my way to work doesn’t mean I ever had the opportunity to deal with this before today, you know.  Asshole.)  I walked in, the guy working there glanced up at me, I handed him my busted piece of crap, and five minutes later I was driving home, sailing over speed bumps and whipping around right turns to a soundtrack of gloriously uninterrupted satellite-based audio.

At various junctures I have tried to describe to Jared two cartoons I remember seeing as a kid.  Both had remained very deeply enmeshed in my psyche for whatever reason, but without a visual I was simply unable to explain their visceral impact to him.  Also, time had blurred many details of the cartoons and I wanted to see them again myself.  It took some advanced googling, but I was able to locate videos of both!  Come, experience some of the crazy shit that remains forever lodged in the bowels of my soul.

The first is “Banty Raids”, a Warner Brothers joint in which Foghorn Leghorn is placed inside a Rube Goldberg machine that forcibly dresses him in drag.  Upon ejection from the machine, he promptly enters into a gay marriage with a beatnik rooster.  Predating my first viewing of Rocky Horror, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, et al. by many years, this cartoon had an indefinable but very real effect on my nascent views of femininity and sexuality.

The second is Disney’s version of what is apparently a legendary tall tale.  It concerns the cowboy Pecos Bill and his best girl, who is thrown from a horse onto her bustle and is launched into a tragic and unstoppable fit of bouncing that eventually slings her from the earth to the moon.  This made me profoundly sad when I was little, and it still does.  In the original legend, Pecos Bill shoots the girl to put her out of her misery, which actually seems less unbearable than Disney’s ending.

They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.