I’m in ur airport, stealin’ ur WiFi

Remember that one White Whine where the girl is all “Ugh! The free wireless in this airport VIP lounge is sooooo slow!”

Totally.

I’m lurking in the Portland International Airport, waiting for my mom to arrive from overseas so we can go hang out with our relatives. The wireless I’m stealing is quite slow, but not so slow as to prevent me from telling you that I just got off a flight where I sat behind a mom with a kindergartner and a toddler. The toddler had a hard flight – he was sleepy, and the airplane was one of those tubes so claustrophobic that it just seems UNLIKELY that even an agency as disorganized as the FAA would go “Yes! This is totally safe and fine.”

When he wasn’t crying, the little guy roamed the aisles, checking us out. He kept coming back to me, where I would say the kinds of stupid things you say to little kids like “Hey! What have you got there? Wow, a box of raisins! That’s amazing.”

And THEN he looked up at me very intently and SMILED beatifically and reached up one chubby baby hand and PALMED MY BOOB. And he’d wander away and come back and DO IT AGAIN, looking very serious and pleased.

The poor businessman-looking-guy sitting next to me reading one of those books that’s like JACK DONAGHY’S GUIDE TO BUSINESS was sort of freaked out by the boob-palming, but got very “!!!!!WHAT THE EFF.” when the handsy toddler climbed into my lap and kept trying to lift up my shirt.

There’s a very limited window of time when that’s cute behavior: when you’re 14 months old, it’s hilarious and charming. Pretty much any other time, NOT SO MUCH.

Things girlfriends don’t actually say to each other.

So The Ex-List got cancelled. On the one hand, don’t speak ill of the dead! On the other hand, MY CATHOLIC SCHOOL, LET ME SHOW YOU IT.

One of the reasons Naomi and I get along really well is that we both like to eat food and to talk about foods we may eat in the future. Another reason is how obsessed we are with dogs. Another reason is that we both like to be hilarious. Another reason is that SEX MAKES US NERVOUS.*

Because The Ex-List had a kind of cute premise and was about girls, and because I like girls, I watched the first episode. Well– I tried to. Really, I made it to about the halfway mark and then I turned it off, never to return. Because the one girl had just walked into the kitchen and flipped up her dress to show the main girl her freshly-waxed mons pubis. And then they had A CONVERSATION ABOUT THAT.

And the conversation did not go:

INSANE GIRL
Hey, check out my hairless private area!

NORMAL GIRL
Holy shit, what is your problem?!? GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN YOU NUTBALL.

Instead it was like:

INSANE GIRL
Hey, had I mentioned that I am cool and edgy recently?

OTHER INSANE GIRL
No, but I love hearing anecdotes that illustrate that fact, so lay it on me!

INSANE GIRL
(lifts skirt)
CHECK IT.

OTHER INSANE GIRL
Wow, you got all your pubic hair removed! That’s totally awesome. I’m glad that we’re the kind of friends who can show each other our vulvas.

INSANE GIRL
Me too.

OTHER INSANE GIRL
What are you up to tonight? Do you have any PLANS THAT INVOLVE YOUR VAGINA?

INSANE GIRL
Why, yes– [sexual blah blah blah blah, I tuned out because I was too horrified.]

I think I would burst into tears if someone showed me their cooter for no good reason. WHO ARE THESE WOMEN who do things like this? I don’t know girls like this! Most of my conversations are more like:

GIRL HOLDING A BOOK ON DOGS
Hey!

GIRL READING THE NEW COOK’S ILLUSTRATED
Hey! What’s up ?

GIRL HOLDING A BOOK ON DOGS
Say, do you like pho?

GIRL READING THE NEW COOK’S ILLUSTRATED
The delicious Vietnamese noodle soup? HECK YES.

GIRL HOLDING A BOOK ON DOGS
LET’S GO TO LITTLE SAIGON.

GIRL READING THE NEW COOK’S ILLUSTRATED
Cool! Maybe on the way we can talk about how neurotic we are.

***

Also! In celebration of the fact that this election is ALMOST OVER and I won’t be able to share this much longer, I am going to re-post the most glorious bit of Obama-related good times ever:

Outstanding.

*…not… like THAT. Mostly what I mean is that I find it alarming when people want to have smarmy off-color conversations with you, or… people who don’t wear nearly enough clothing. Like there’s this girl in my friend’s neighborhood who walks her dog wearing the most IMPROBABLE shirts. And I make smalltalk with her and think things like “OMGICANSEEBASICALLYYOURWHOLEBOOBTHERE MAYBEYOUDON’TREALIZE”.

AND YES, I know that some of you are reading this and thinking “But you named your blog after a slang phrase for lesbian pornography!” – BUT, I didn’t actually know that people used that phrase FOR REAL, I thought it was just to be hilarious.

Don Draper’s guide to the ladies.

I feel that “Let’s get me out of this skirt” was the best part of that.

Also! It makes me think of how sometimes young men are all “Girls like guys who are assholes!!!! THAT IS UNFAIR AND ALSO THE ROOT CAUSE OF WHY I AM NOT GETTING ANY!”

Girls don’t like guys who are assholes (unless their dad was mean to them. If their dad was mean to them, you are ON YOUR OWN.), girls like DON DRAPER, because he’s masculine and slightly scary. In France, people say things like VIVE LA DIFFERENCE about this issue. In the US, because the sexual revolution confused all of us very deeply, we say things like GIRLS LIKE ASSHOLES and then we obsess over Mad Men.

PS, did you see the season finale? This is the most amazing TV show. It’s like… TV by professionals, for grownups, and it tends to make everything else look like TV as made by the yearbook committee.

I LOVE YOU MATTHEW WEINER. YOU ARE A GENIUS.

***

This morning I went in to the kitchen to make coffee, and as I’m standing there waiting for the first pot to finish brewing so I can make the second pot, an executive walks in and says good morning and sighs happily at the sight of fresh coffee. And then he reaches for the pot and pulls it out from under the stream of still-brewing coffee, which sputters madly on the hot plate thing. And for a long moment, as I stared at a mess I would have to clean up, I didn’t realize that he just hadn’t noticed that the coffee wasn’t done brewing. I thought he just had an EXTREME case of Executive Entitlement. SAD.

I am kind of SURLY today. Here are some things I am kind of surly about:

*[writing "career" panic and feelings of inadequacy go here]

*BALLOT INITIATIVES. They piss me off. Here I am, FUNDING MY STATE LEGISLATORS with my tax dollars, and you want me to do your job? I have a ballot initiative for next time. I’m going to call it THE INITIATIVE WHEREIN I INVITE YOU TO COME TO MY PLACE OF WORK AND DO MY JOB FOR ME BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO MAKE ANY DECISIONS ON MY OWN BUT YOU ARE STILL GOING TO HAVE TO PAY ME, SUCKERS.

*Yesterday I was having coffee in Silverlake and this painfully hip guy with a beard sat down nearby. I happen to like beards and find them handsome and it is really irritating to me that hipsters have co-opted them as some kind of IRONIC STATEMENT. If you are wearing giant 80s sunglasses and a terrible 80s suit you got at some extremely overpriced vintage shop and you couldn’t build a deck if someone held a gun to your head, you shouldn’t have a beard. It’s false advertising!

*If I had a dog, I would probably torture him by forcing him to wear one of these costumes for Halloween. I am favoring Dog Elvis and Dog Getting Eaten By A Crocodile. But… I DON’T HAVE A DOG.

(Yes, I DO have a case of the Mondays, thank you for asking.)

INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY

OCTOBER 22 IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY.

TO CELEBRATE SOMEONE SHOULD BUY ME THIS BEARDS NOT BOMBS T-SHIRT.

IT WILL BE AS INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO PEOPLE AS MY “NO KIDDING, I HATE VOTING” T-SHIRT. WHICH, PS, MAKES ME FEEL TOTALLY MISUNDERSTOOD IN LIFE, BECAUSE COME ON! THAT IS HILARIOUS. STOP THINKING I’M MAKING A FOR-SERIOUS STATEMENT ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF HOPE WHEN I WEAR IT, GUYS. IT’S DISMAYING.

Businesswoman Voice

You know that Jerry Seinfeld routine about how airports seem to think that they’re sovereign nations that can do whatever they want? (Specifically, he’s talking about how they believe that they can charge 42 dollars for a sandwich.)

Studio lots are sort of like that, aren’t they? In most places in the world, calling someone and going “My boss doesn’t like pickles. I put it on the fax. NO PICKLES. But there was a pickle in here, and it touched the bread!” would get a kind of “…” response, but on a lot, it tends to be met with the appropriate level of OH GOD WHAT A DISASTER WE’LL GET YOU A NEW SANDWICH RIGHT AWAY!

Sometimes I wonder about people who get to high places in entertainment and then leave to go work in a different industry. How do they handle it? It must be a complete shock to the system, what with people going “Please stop yelling” and “If you throw that at me, I’m calling HR” and “So… take the pickle out! What are you, five years old? If your foods touch you have a meltdown? NEED ME TO CUT THE CRUSTS OFF, YOU BIG DORK?”

There’s a kind of arms race of urgency that goes on in entertainment. On some level, I think, people do actually know that making movies is not… very important. I mean, sure, it’s fun to make movies about giant robots and all, but it’s not like you’re curing bird flu or moving oil around the globe or anything that has real and serious consequences attached if you fuck up. If you fuck up in entertainment, uh, somebody gets a package tomorrow instead of this afternoon. Which is just not very exciting! And people in entertainment like to feel important and excited. So I guess they create the stakes themselves.

Even though I get pretty eyerolly about this stuff, I am totally complicit. Sometimes I hear myself on the phone, talking to some poor FedEx guy in what Naomi calls Businesswoman Voice, saying things like “This is just unacceptable!” (even though… come on, I don’t actually care if some dude gets his screener this afternoon. NOTHING BAD WILL HAPPEN if he gets it tomorrow.) and it’s always a shock. I DON’T WANT TO BE THAT GIRL!

Last week I had a horrible moment where I heard myself doing Businesswoman Voice, and I realized that OH NO, I had BECOME Scary Female Entertainment Assistant. OMG! The worst. I DON’T WANT TO BE SCARY FEMALE ENTERTAINMENT ASSISTANT! I want to be things like: your friend who tries out cookie recipes on you. Or: that girl up the street with the hilarious dog with the giant paws. Or: a person who is generally pretty nice and laid-back.

(I would also take: a girl who is a super fabulous writer of big-budget Guy Movies featuring explosions and interesting female characters.)

Here are some pleasing things:

Here, Denis’ kid puts business reply envelopes to good use. HILARIOUS. I remember being very, very interested in writing when I was about four years old: I would scribble madly on pieces of paper and take them to my mom and demand to know what I had written. (Yes… my grasp of how “writing” worked was sort of shaky.) I remember my mom squinting at one such epistle and saying “…well, that part looks sort of like “camel”, I guess.” I found that VERY satisfying.

The BEST blog: Upside Down Dogs. DOES WHAT IT SAYS ON THE CAN:

Finally, I am embarrassed by how much I dig the cat on the right. LOOK AT HIM! He is glorious in his smugness.

Libersocialism

Guys, I cannot WAIT for this election to be over. I am desperate for people to stop going “Hey! Do you want to rant with me in slightly sexually-violent language about how Sarah Palin deserves to be mauled by bears?”* or “Hey, want to hear my theory on how Barack Obama is a secret Muslim?”**

Although the latter does make me want to start a blog called BARACK OBAMA, SECRET MUSLIM.

BARACK OBAMA, SECRET MUSLIM
DAY 357
Another day on the campaign trail. It’s pretty hard to campaign during Ramadan. People are all “Hey, Barack, good morning! Want some BACON?” and then you have to not let on that you can’t eat until after sundown. Or that swine are unclean. Or that you’re plotting to destroy this country in the name of Allah.

It’s a good thing I have my secret Muslim faith to sustain me or this would be a real drag. BRB, gotta go oppress Michelle and the girls.

In light of my dislike of EVERYONE and ALL POLITICAL BELIEFS, I continue to work on my own political party. So far I’m calling it LIBERSOCIALISM. We’re going to be all about things like “Being grouchy” and “Living in remote shacks” and “Telling whiny people to suck it” but we’re also going to have a Scandinavian-style health care system and be really into recycling. And dogs. FREE DOGS FOR EVERYONE.

*No.
**No.

SEXY PIRATES GUYS

Okay, you know how on Halloween, many young ladies dress as “A sexy X”?

(Not actually a sexy LETTER X. Although that would be pretty great.)

“I’m a SEXY PIRATE.”

“I’m a SEXY PHARMACIST.”

“I’m a SEXY ELECTRICAL ENGINEER.”

Etcetera.

Serious question: why don’t girls just dress as hookers?

“What’s your costume?”

“I’m a whore.”

“..a what?”

“Just cutting to the chase, dude.”

Also it would be awesome because then girls would go “I’m a PIRATE-THEMED HOOKER” or “I’m a HOOKER WHO WORKS IN A HOSPITAL OR SOME SHIT LIKE THAT, who the hell knows, the point is that I get to SHOW YOU MY BOOBS and you can’t say anything, because it’s HALLOWEEN, SUCKAS” or you’d have some post-feminist type who’d say “I’m a self-empowered SEX WORKER” (she would wear dark-rimmed glasses) but they would still get to wear all the same outfits, so it would be very practical.

…

…

1) So there’s this hilarious blog, (fake) UTA Job List. It contains FAKE job postings like this:

4th Assistant
Director of Development seeks 4th Assistant. Previous 4th Assistant took 2nd Assistant position elsewhere. Duties include assisting 3rd Assistant with 1st Assistant’s personal errands and filling in for 3rd Assistant when 3rd Assistant substitutes for 2nd Assistant if 2nd Assistant is out sick or shadowing 1st Assistant, lunch pick-ups for 1st-3rd Assistants and light filing. Benefits after 3 months. Excellent opportunity for someone looking to become a 3rd assistant. 10/7

Hilarious! Imagine my dismay when I realized that people all over the internet (okay okay, in like two places) were going “WHAT? WHO NEEDS FOUR ASSISTANTS IN THIS ECONOMY? RIDICULOUS!”

Sigh! One of life’s biggest disappointments is when you’re being funny and people think you’re totally for real.

2) People apparently do not know what “Steady hand at the tiller” means.

Guys. Come on. Really? YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A TILLER IS? Our country is going to get overrun by a bunch of pirates and we’ll be defenseless.

A letter.

Dear Barack Obama:

Listen, this is sort of awkward, but you know how I gave you money a while back? I’m starting to feel like maybe I wasn’t clear about how that was just a one-time thing. You’re a great guy, but I’m just really busy right now. Between work and writing and thinking about dogs, I don’t have time to enter into a meaningful donor relationship at this point in my life!

It’s nothing personal. I’m still going to vote for you and everything. But I think we should both move on and see other people. For instance, you can see any of the millions of true believers who think that by kissing your ring they’ll acquire the ability to cure cancer WITH THEIR MIND or whatever. As for myself, I’m thinking of maybe becoming a Libertarian. I can carry around a copy of Reason Magazine, which I will use to deflect horrible political conversations at work:

“Say, want to talk about how Sarah Palin is EXACTLY LIKE HITLER?”

“CAN’T TALK NOW, READING ABOUT THE GOLD STANDARD.”

Anyway, it’s not you, it’s me. You seem like a cool guy and I’m sure you’re going to make some annoyingly naive first-time voter out there really happy*. But I really have to ask you to stop emailing me five times a day asking me to give you more money and explaining why John McCain is out of touch with the middle class. You and I really don’t have that kind of thing going on and it’s starting to get on my nerves.

Best of luck with everything,

Elana

*Until, of course, they have their first big WHAT THE FUCK moment about six months into your first term.

Wherein I join a mob.

I had an excellent adventure last night.

Following an evening based on food and movies, I was standing around outside Julie’s house with her neighbor Steve and his girlfriend when suddenly we heard a loud CLAPPSDLKSDFHGHSDKLSDK.

“My God,” the adults said. “Somebody hit a car!”

“I think it was, like, somebody slamming a dumpster lid,” I said, confidently.

And then there was a squeal of tires and a second crash. Hmmmm. Naturally, being totally nosy, we all walked down to see what was going on. What was going on was that someone had hit a parked car and kept going, and hit another parked car, and kept going.

Many locals had come out of their apartments and were milling around. Mind you, this was at 2:30 AM and about NINE SECONDS post-crash. And then three tow trucks showed up, which launched a spirited diatribe by Steve on the subject of how tow truck drivers were more organized and responsive than actual cops. There was also a vague rumor that some intrepid citizen had come running out of his house and had taken off on his motorcycle in HOT PURSUIT.

And then a man in a small white pickup truck pulled up and said “The driver went off that way!” and some random white guy stepped out of the crowd and asked if he could catch a ride, and OFF THEY WENT.

And THEN the rest of us FORMED A MOB and followed them.

YES. AN ACTUAL MOB. People had dogs on leashes and cups of tea and were wearing slippers, but by God, we were going to see JUSTICE done. Also there were a number of drunk young men in the mob, so for the first several blocks there was quite a bit of grandstanding about how they were going to kick the asses of any hit-and-run drivers. Julie proposed that, being a Southern California mob, we just lecture the offender sternly. “Hey, man… that’s not cool.”

The mob lasted in this format for about four blocks. I was walking next to a drunk kid in a USC shirt when his cell rang.

“Hey bro,” he said. “Yeah, I can’t really talk right now… I’m in a mob. Okay, catch you later.”

(Then he turned back.)

The mob began to lose members at about this time, and when the much-diminished group took a wrong turn on Vista (the rumored destination of the driver), instead of seeing an exciting CITIZEN’S ARREST, all we saw was two carloads of middle-aged Chinese people standing around swapping sixpacks of Crystal Geyser from one car to another. They were quite surprised to turn around and see a horde of vigilantes.

By then we were pretty bored with this whole mob thing, so we walked back to the scene of the crime. One of the tow truck drivers informed us that the driver had been caught a few blocks away (NORTH on Vista, not SOUTH. Darn.) and was being arrested. We were all pretty sad that we’d missed it, but glad to have participated in a once-in-a-lifetime mob event.

So! All in all I thought it was a pretty good evening.

(Although I am now sort of mystified that mobs ever get anything accomplished, because ours really lost steam/motivation/membership after four blocks and would definitely not have been able to overrun an embassy or lynch a horse thief or ANYTHING.)