April 26, 2004
Sorry about the lack of updates lately. I'm tied up with my career as Crazy EBay Shoe Lady and also the weather's been unbelievable so there's no way I can stay inside. I know you're thinking "Eh, excuses," but I'm really an amateur compared to some of my eBay buyers with their reasons for not paying me. If it's not that a thief has run off with their checkbook, it's that their boss has forgotten to pay them this week, so they decide to use their son's PayPal account… now if only the FBI could locate him. Of course none of this stops them from bidding on $500 purses at other people's auctions. I mean, one has to have a hobby, especially if one's life is filled with such a bizarre level of bad luck.
I was also going to start a new feature where I combined movie reviews with presidential gaffes. I would call it Lights, Camera, Asinine. I got halfway through a compelling article weaving Johnny Depp's performance in Secret Window with the speech where George Bush was pretending to look under his desk for the WMD and realized that I, like certain leaders, didn't know what I was doing. Maybe you should be grateful I don't update every day.
April 20, 2004
As most of you know, I have some sort of inexplicable hold over many, many men. I mean, how many times has the homeless guy on the corner asked me to marry him? It's been like three or four times. Seriously, I've lost count.
I'm on a dating hiatus and am really enjoying it -- I'm eBaying like nobody's business and reading books by British authors since I am boycotting American authors until I become one. The laws of nature being what they are, I've had lots of men asking me out lately and it occurred to me that I'm not so much on hiatus as I am being a date miser.
Now that I'm down to the end, either the potential relationship or the story of the web site has to be going somewhere vis a vis each date.
Anyway, the only one I would break my fake hiatus/portion out a date for is a guy I met at a party recently. A young man who is pursuing a career in the arts. A musician, actually.
I just heard a collective sigh of relief from the men who are not in Seattle, haven't met me recently or are not musicians.
I'm also hung up on some guy in L.A., but then who isn't?
April 19, 2004
I was coming back from my thrift-store shopping on the bus the other morning and it was crowded so I sat in back. The back of the bus is much more social than the grim, forward-facing seats in front. I think it's because it's set up like a conversation area in a living room. It's like being at a party, but without drinks, appetizers or people you'd ever want to see again. There was a couple with a boy and girl each about 7 years old and a guy who I think was their teacher all sitting across from me.
The kids were named Darius and Toby but I couldn't tell who was who.
"You need to start a Girl's Club if he won't let you in the Boy's Club," said the mom to Darius or Toby.
"Eh, the Boy's Club always seems to unravel right away, anyway," said the dad.
"Yeah, after they do 'pull my finger' there isn't much else to say and it falls apart," said the teacher guy.
"No, one of them gets a girlfriend and it falls apart," said the dad, laughing.
Like most women who've attended grade school, high school, college or any work environment, I'm more than familiar with the Boy's Club. But as a female, I'm not quite clear on the rules. I know in the workplace, it's Have a Penis, Make 23% More, but what about the dating rules? (Otherwise known as The Guy's Code, also known as When Is It Okay To Move In On Another Guy's Woman and its corollary But What If She's Really Hot?)
If two friends are attracted to the same woman, does it matter who saw her first, who asked her out first, who slept with her first? When guys have a brutal falling out at work, they still manage to grab a beer or a game of B-ball with each other that night and everything's okay. Does swooping in on someone else's girlfriend work the same way?
I have a ton of male friends. The fact that I can't even get a consistent answer to this question indicates to me just how impermeable the Boy's Club really is.
No wonder men rule the world.
There's something about Mary... usually it's a wet spot
April 12, 2004
I'm violently allergic to cats, so wasn't too thrilled to hear that I'd be spending Easter with one. I was invited to an open house at Anastasia's and she got a new 4-year-old cat from the animal shelter last week. Apparently the cat, Mary, was found living on the streets with one leg through her collar. This made it hard for her to get around and damaged her vocal chords. Now her meow comes out as a croak and she has to eat tiny pieces of kitten food because most of her teeth have fallen out. She also drools a lot.
Animals are always the center of attention at a party when they first appear, then most of the guests tend to get bored (huge, slobbering dog that farts) or annoyed (small, nervous dog that yaps) depending on the animal. Mary has lots of problems, but unpopularity is not going to be one of them. I wasn't allergic, I was in love.
A bottle of champagne, two bottles of great red wine and one big bottle of chardonnay between the six of us later, she was still endearing. There's something about this croaky, drooling cat that's just thrilling. Perhaps it's that her feline sense of entitlement is sweetly tempered by her tragic past. Perhaps it's that despite the fact that she's four, she doesn't look a day over nine months.
"She was really strutting around when she first saw me at the shelter," Anastasia said as Mary contentedly lifted her face from a puddle on the couch. "It's almost as if she knew it was her big chance to be chosen. I haven't seen any signs of that cat since."
As we snacked on pasta salad with shrimp, homemade chocolate cake with blue sprinkles in the shape of an Easter egg and slices of cold ham, I thought of Mary purposely making herself attractive to Anastasia. I mean, a cat couldn't possible deduce the need to make a good first impression.
Could it?
The thought of an animal parading around in an effort to get picked reminded me of all the things I see humans do to get picked. Men with their rehearsed anecdotes and the women who laugh flirtatiously at those stories whether they're funny or not. The way we dress, the way we stand, the white lies we tell to new people with the hope that we'll be the one chosen for a good home.
And really, if a drooling, toothless kitty who can't meow can find love, there's hope for at least some of the rest of us.
April 7, 2004
Sometimes I think about gender differences.
When I was in 4th grade, the girls in our class put together a play we had written. Looking back, it was actually quite a clever premise. We each played a different character from literature, unrelated to each other, and threw them together to see how they'd interact. The end result was Snow White discussing her views on the Seven Dwarfs with Alice in Wonderland, who in turn would enlighten her on the whole rabbit-hole situation.
It was free-flowing and impromptu and at one point we danced through the aisle we had made with the classroom chairs. Our audience -- the boys in class -- punched and pinched us as we passed, effectively ending our performance. Later, our reviews were harsher than a bad off-Broadway play being trounced by the New York Times. Our teacher angrily asked us what we were thinking walking through a male audience? Did we expect to not be punched and kicked?
When I was 12 or 13, the kids in the cafeteria used to chant "Ritchie, Ritchie, Ritchie," because it was the last name of one of the school lunch ladies. I guess we didn't like her, although I've honestly never been a big fan of ganging up on someone or name calling. I can't remember my role, but as usual I was probably some sort of clueless bystander. What I do remember is that the school sent a letter to my parents stating that two tables -- one of boys, one of girls -- in the cafeteria were chanting during lunch and that it was very upsetting for Mrs. Ritchie. (Mrs. Ritchie. Amazing who could get married back in the '80s, by the way. I know women who look like supermodels and own their own companies, yet can't get a date to save their lives. Apparently "the zeros" is social commentary as well as a decade marker, but I digress…)
My parents laughed hysterically, framed the reprimand letter and hung it on the wall in their bedroom. I was pissed, though. The letter clearly stated that there were two sexes to blame, yet the word all over the newly quiet cafeteria the next day that only the girls' parents got the letter. I guess the school district really took the old "boys will be boys and are prone to chant stuff" saying to heart.
When I was a sophomore in high school, we all had to take a class entitled "hygiene," a surprisingly boring euphemism for "sex and drugs." Along with really dull clinical analysis of the stuff many students were ingesting at their lockers, we were informed by our gym teacher/drug counselor/sex therapist that "when things get hot in the backseat, it's the girl's responsibility to control the situation, because boys can't." (The news that sophomore girls were the ones who had to bear all burden of sexual responsibility was joyfully embraced by several members of the faculty, by the way.)
I wonder what my web site would be if it were called Dating Andy? I'm thinking it would include a whole lotta sex and that the letters I get would start "You stud..." instead of "Don't you feel slutty having dinner with two different men in the same week?"
Kurt, we hardly knew ya
April 5, 2004
Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld
So I can sigh eternally
Ten years after his death, the singer-songwriter who inadvertently created "grunge," caused flannel to appear on NYC runways and became One Of The Most Important Rock Stars Of All Time is still attracting the kind of media attention that he hated.
Kurt Cobain had always been the quintessential anti-rock star. Unhappy with his fame once it extended beyond Seattle ("I don't like my fans anymore"), he was accused by his record company of purposely trying to make Nirvana's second (and last) studio album In Utero non-commercial. If that's true, he failed: track after track became hits and are radio staples even today.
His music and persona were the perfect ironic counterpoint to the kind of attention the band began to draw after their first major-label release Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the charts and had frat boys trying to figure out what "a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido" meant.
Homeless kid, high-school dropout, roadie, junky. He seemed like an accidental superstar, yet his bandmates claim that Cobain was ambitious. He wrote a song per night, made them practice for hours every day and was a taskmaster in the studio. He was quoted as saying that when the other two-thirds of Nirvana didn't like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" the first time they heard it, he made them play it hundreds of times in a row.
Here we are now
Entertain us
Like most people, I hadn't heard of Nirvana before Nevermind. My boyfriend at the time lent it to me and dismissively said that the lead singer was a heroin addict. The music just sounded like noise to me, so I listened to it again. And again. I couldn't have guessed that I was hearing the sound of the new mainstream. My relationship with Nirvana far outlasted the one with the boyfriend in both length and significance.
Despite a career that easily places him in the company of Dylan, Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, Cobain has a puny four-CD catalogue and a career that spanned just two-and-a-half years in the public eye. He has an output-to-legacy ratio that rivals James Dean's, although he is more likely to be compared to John Lennon.
I'm so ugly
That's okay 'cause so are you
We've broken mirrors.
Like Lennon, Cobain had the gift for being angry without being off-putting and for expressing intimate emotions that spoke to the masses. He also married Courtney Love, a woman who surpasses Yoko as most unpopular wife in rock & roll history. Loud, obnoxious, consistently out-of-control, Love continues to make Cobain look like even more of a misunderstood waif than his vulnerable, wrenching vocals do.
Well I swear that I
Don't have a gun
I remember driving home from my job at UCLA when KROQ delivered the news that the body of a 27-year-old male Caucasian was found in a Seattle home, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The body was thought to be Cobain's. I felt heartsick, although not at all surprised. It's typical of the exploitation Cobain routinely attracted that the electrician who discovered his body immediately phoned a radio station rather than the police.
It seems that his world is as tumultuous in death as it was in life. A lot has happened with him just in the two-and-a-half years I've lived in Seattle. Courtney gave his private diaries to her lover and he wrote a bestseller, there was a bitter legal battle over Nirvana's songwriting royalties (complete with an open letter to fans from Kurt's mom and the rest of Nirvana, David Grohl and Krist Novoselic, trying to have Courtney declared insane). Of course there are the continuing rumors that his death wasn't a suicide.
Just because you're paranoid
Don't mean they're not after you
A hurricane of bizarre conspiracy theories has been twisting around Courtney Love for the past decade. A Seattle detective said that with all the drugs Cobain had in his system, he wouldn't have had the strength to lift a gun, much less be able to pull its trigger. Although he was the perfect victim since his tendency toward self-destruction was so public, it seems far-fetched to think that someone could get away with murdering the most famous rock star in the world. Maybe to some people, thinking that his death wasn't a suicide somehow makes it more palatable.
The end result is that Cobain has left behind a bipolar legacy. On the one hand, his suicide felt like a betrayal to a lot of people -- a Seattle music professor accurately pointed out that it would have been less devastating if he had just overdosed. On the other hand, he is arguably the most important musician of the last 20 years.
When they first appeared, Nirvana was given a lot of accolades for sounding fresh compared to the hair bands who were their contemporaries. It's over 10 years later and they still sound fresh, but this time it's compared to all the bands who managed to rip off their sound, but not their songwriter's talent.
Rest in peace, Kurt. I hope there are no reporters in your Leonard Cohen afterworld.
It's your friends... and the way you chew.
April 2, 2004
It's a little-known bit of Star Wars trivia that in the original version of the film, Yoda advises Luke Skywalker to "Do or do not… and while you're at it, could you change these things about yourself, since it looks like we're going to be spending a lot of time together" and hands him a list of Luke's character flaws and annoying habits. Luke then weakly answers "I'll try" as his eyes scan a full page of 8-point font.
Sadly, that scene was scrapped for the pithier "Do or do not. There is no try," which not only shaved almost three seconds off the film's running time, but was also more realistic, as both characters were men.
You see, men tend to shrug and accept or they just stop calling, but there isn't a biological drive to fix people -- and by that I mean their women -- based on perceived potential, what their friends' girlfriends are like or which phase the moon is in. That is the realm of women.
I consider myself a masculine thinker. I love hanging out with guys. I've been in bands; I've been the only woman on editorial staffs. I see right through men… and I date like they do. The web site is testimony to that. Not for me instant adoration and forsaking all others after a great first date -- I'm busy getting ready for dinner with the next guy.
Yet I horrify myself when I like a man who doesn't fit me quite right and think: "Fixer upper! I will explain to him exactly what he's doing wrong and then he can change."
I actually start to justify it by thinking that I would be doing him a service. That if he could be a better listener, he wouldn't repeat past relationship mistakes; if he could be less sarcastic, his love life would be smoother. I mentally tell myself that I'm no different from a Jedi master -- a Jedi dating master! Men can learn from my great wisdom. Then I conjure an even bigger lie: that I want to make him better for the women in his future.
I mean really, unless they're going to give me a room over the garage after they're married, what do I care?<<< home >>>
