I Pity The Fool

1. If you are at least 7 months pregnant, and cracking open a brand-new copy of "He’s Just Not that Into You" on the D train…I’m worried about you.

*

2. If you are one of my patients…and you missed your appointment…and then when I call you, you hang up on me…you’re not doing anyone any favors.  I mean, in terms of the fact that I got an extra hour of time to do other things today, I guess you did me a favor…but my supervisor is still going to instruct me to call you back.

*

3. If you have to ask the Dunkin Donuts counter employee how many calories are in a smoothie, you probably shouldn’t be buying one.

*

4. If you are the obnoxious woman pestering said employee, you should mind your own business and not try to confront me for littering when it was someone else who did it.

*

That is all.

That title is a reference to the refrain from the song, Englishman in New York…actually, I don’t know most of the lyrics, but I felt very much like a brotha from anotha planet at two separate events yesterday. 

First things first: a bridal shower for one of my classmates.  I’ve actually only ever attended one other bridal shower, about three years ago.  I may have felt slightly less awkward at that one, since I happened to know more people there.  This time, I knew a handful of the crowd at the gathering, and apparently it wasn’t quite enough to curb the biting fear of committing some egregious social faux pas.  For example, I had to call my friend M. early in the morning to ask the following: if I had selected a gift from the bride’s online registry, and had it sent to her address for convenience, what (if anything) should I bring to the party???  I didn’t want to show up empty-handed, but it seemed silly to bring flowers…we wound up settling on a card, in which I actually drew pictures of the gifts that I’d ordered…ironically, in the end it turned out that even the registry gifts that were sent to her home had been brought to the party, and were opened along with everything else.  I would never have known that.

This world is a mystery to me.  Growing up, I went to so few weddings…my mom has no siblings and was estranged from most of her cousins for most of my life.  My dad has plenty of cousins, but most of them don’t live in the area.  And as for my friends, the majority of them are either hippie Oberlin-type people, or other varieties of nonconformists who are more or less as clueless about this sort of stuff as I am.  Which is not to say that I had a bad time- I just felt really out of place, like I’d grown up in a jungle and this was my first glimpse of civilization.  Did you know that civilization has a such thing as a "Wishing Well?"  This is a repository (indeed, shaped like a wishing well) for small bridal gifts, mainly for the kitchen, I think.  Can I tell you how glad I am that I didn’t interpret this too literally from the invitation and bring a bunch of penny rolls or something???

The second event was an A.A. meeting- no, I’m not joining, but a friend of mine is celebrating 10 years of sobriety, and invited me to come along.  She’s been thinking about bringing me to an open meeting for a few months now, so that I might learn a little bit about the recovery process, group modality, etc.  I really wasn’t sure what to expect; the people were certainly welcoming, and extremely supportive of each other.  However, I felt highly conscious of the fact that I didn’t know the routine, the mantras, the buzzwords, the norms…  I was a little bit surprised at all the references made to the "Higher Power," and this religious influence could be what triggered a particular feeling in me…  I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but then I realized that it was not unlike the feeling I used to get as a child, attending Mass with my Italian grandmother: specifically, when I was older than the kids who had already made their first Communion, who knew at least the basic prayers and Mass routine.  Although I’ve since come to realize that no one probably noticed, I went through a phase of feeling very self-conscious, like I was being judged by all those people who could participate more fully in the ceremony.  I imagined that they must all have been wondering, "Who is that 10-year-old girl who doesn’t receive Communion?"

Obviously, a lot of time has passed; I’m much older, and a wee bit wiser.  Deep down I was well aware that no one at the bridal shower was even really paying attention to any cluelessness on my part, and certainly no one at A.A. was about to judge me (I’m not sure if they knew that I’m not an alcoholic, but as long as I sat and listened respectfully, I’m sure they didn’t care that I don’t know the Serenity Prayer).  Yet there’s still an awkward 10-year-old inside of me, wanting to look like I know what I’m doing.

*

Before I forget, allow me to share some new spam comments from Lisa.

I originally started with "I’ll make this short."  But once I get going, apparently there’s no stopping me…even when I’m fairly certain that my readership will be unmoved. 

Less Riveting in Retrospect

My story about what happened at the concert on June 9 was much more exciting back when it was more recent.  Gogol Bordello kicked ass, and it’s a good thing that the lead singer Eugene Hütz, likes to climb up on top of things, or I might never have glimpsed him (other than on the monitor at the bar).  This is because many of the tallest and/or rudest audience members felt compelled to plant themselves (along with their cowboy hats, sweaty friends, and/or spastic convulsions) in front of us.  One particularly inconsiderate group of people with no respect for the laws of physics (i.e., two bodies not being able to occupy the same space at the same time) finally went to the moshpit, only to return and resume invading our personal space…now I realize that at a rock concert, my brother and I may need to relax our customary rigidity on this subject…however, this girl was jumping up and down on my bro’s feet while swinging her hair in his face and elbowing me in the stomach.  My response was automatic, self-preserving, and utterly unpremeditated, but when I realized that her bony elbow was about to flail its way back into the former site of my internal bleeding, I went into defense mode, grabbing her arm with both of my hands and forcibly shoving her away.  Amazingly enough, she didn’t seem to notice, but then my brother’s elbow in her back did eventually give her pause. 

At any rate, we had a hard time deciding to move, for the admittedly spiteful reason that we just didn’t want those jerks to win.  However, it was a lost cause.  At least the music was great!  If you like Gogol Bordello, I can also recommend the band that preceded them: Kultur Shock.  I definitely can’t recommend the two bands before that though, so unless you like boring Chemical Brothers rip-offs, avoid Dub Trio, and unless you can somehow turn off the vocals and only listen to the instrumental part, I also heartily encourage you to avoid Outernational.  Later for that.

=========================================================================

An Unpaid Endorsement

In other news, my friend and fellow HCHS alum Steve gave a free performance at Botanica a week ago.  I hadn’t seen his routine in two or three years and he has really honed his craft, basically wiping the floor with the rest of the lineup.  Some of them were funny, but he was by far the best (moreover, my stalwart companion J. concurred). 

And no, Steve didn’t pay me for this endorsement…actually I am pretty sure he doesn’t read IPTF, so he may never even know about all this good press.  Those of you on Friendster can find him here, and he also has a profile on MySpace and a whole bunch of other sites.

=========================================================================

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Today was a little crazy.  I went to work in the morning, but left early to scramble together the gifts for our department’s secretaries, in order to bring them with me to my FINAL DISSERTATION APPOINTMENT.  Yes, after Staples got my $105 last month for 6 copies of my 150-page doctoral project (that’s 900 pages total if you do the math, kiddos, and try carrying THAT around in a backpack- it’s like the weight of your entire education digging into your shoulders), today I got to cough up another $100 for binding and microfilm.  It’s like one final kick in the nuts to my bank account from higher education…well, final until I spend $700+ applying for state licensure anyway…

Anyway though, I got it in.  So all that’s left between me and "Dr. Liz" are nine more workdays.  Pretty sweet.

I think I’ll leave out the laborious detail of how much running around I had to do to actually get everything done today, other than to repeat a few odd interchanges.  One was between two men, who were discussing buying a good suit.  I wish I could remember the exact wording, but basically the louder one was saying that making a real commitment to a suit is harder than committing to a woman.  It was funnier the way he said it…  Whatever.

The other thing was this lady who wouldn’t stop asking me for directions to McDonald’s on 58th St. She got on the train at 96th St. and needed to actually follow me off the train at 59th, because she couldn’t understand my instructions… She kept repeating that she had heard they might be hiring there (if it existed), and was sent there by another McDonald’s that was not hiring. She also said she’d been getting lost and looking for jobs all day long. Call me crazy, but I think if you’re too stupid to FIND McDonald’s, then you may be the one person who’s too stupid to WORK at McDonald’s.
=========================================================================

Kicking It (with some G’s on the West Si-ide)

The kickball excursion last Saturday was a resounding success, for those who may have been curious.  Well, all of it except for the group of misguided hipsters who asked to borrow my ball, and then busted it.  They offered my crew three middling beers as an apology.  I don’t drink beer.  I was enjoying the spirit of the festivities, the good weather, and the alcohol sufficiently that I didn’t get too upset.  Which is not to say that I would be sorry if they wound up helping a certain bike cop meet his ticket quota.  He showed up around sunset, and my crowd judiciously tidied up our area; last I saw, the kickball-killers were still sitting there with some open containers. >;}

=========================================================================

One Last Thing…

I got my stolen umbrella back.  Maybe that was karmic compensation for my kickball?

A few journal-style notes.

Last week was a mixture of good and bad experiences…  If you’re wondering about my medical test, it went fine, and in fact the worst part of it was the preparation (all-liquid diet on Sunday, plus a good half-gallon of human Draino).  The only painful part was right when I got the anesthesia, but of course I was out right after that.  Moral of the story, I have a clean bill of health and will hopefully not get sick somewhere in the middle of Eastern Europe this summer.

Work sucked last week, but what else is new?  Most of my patients didn’t show up, but someone else’s patient stole my umbrella on a rainy day…my fancy, $30 umbrella, the kind that can’t blow inside out, that I thought would be the last one I’d ever have to buy!  Punk.  My coworker S. blamed himself for not paying attention to the thievery: he felt so bad that he gave me his umbrella for the way home- what a gentleman.

On Wednesday, we saw another Italian movie that we didn’t like.  I think that I would not have enjoyed it very much under any circumstances, but the situation was not helped by the incredible odor of a nearby fellow theatergoer…  Have you ever been near someone with breath so bad that it was distracting?  Imagine how bad the breath must be if the person isn’t even sitting anywhere near you.  To complicate matters, every so often someone else was letting off a barrage of sulfuric SBDs.  I actually wound up watching the last half hour or so of the movie with a tissue over my noise.  Jackie thought I was moved to tears, but it was more of a substitute gas mask.  One thing’s for sure: I’ll never forget that film.

Then on Thursday night, Jackie and I went to an art opening at ICP.  I would have felt really cultured and bourgeois in the best sense if not for my weird clothes and decrepit backpack…  There were four featured shows, which you can check out at the above link. 

• I enjoyed most of Atta Kim’s work, especially his ice sculpture shots, and his long exposure, large format prints of the Last Supper with naked Korean people.  I can’t find a direct link, but you can click on the thumbnails here. 
• Weegee is always a classic, especially if you’re a die-hard New Yorker like I am.  One of my favorites of his that was on display was a picture of a kid in a boxy, completely unfuturistic mask that says "Space Patrol."  Again, you can find the thumbnail on his page. 
• The beleaguered female Bauhaus artist (token?) Marianne Brandt’s work was definitely very interesting and unusual, although I have to admit that I would never have picked up on the purported allegories or associations detailed in the blurbs by each of her collages.  Oddly enough, several of the thumbnails on her page seem to be pieces that I did not see in the exhibit. 
• Lastly, there was a comparative show of the work of the famous photographer/historian/ archivist Eugene Atget, mounted next to that of the contemporary documentarian, Christopher Rauschenberg.  It’s a good thing I didn’t express my opinion too loudly in the room, because apparently he was standing right next to me (actually, the lady conversing with him hit me in the face with the sweater she was casually tossing over her shoulder).  Honestly, Atget’s work is classic, and even though in the past I haven’t always found it riveting, it makes Rauschenberg’s material literally pale in comparison.  Atget’s warm tones and well-composed (if slightly repetitive) scenes of old Paris are the elegant originals.  Rauschenberg’s meanderings seem more like the work of a pretentious student who thinks that if something’s in black and white, it counts as artistic.  Sorry, but I took better photos on my last vacation and I don’t get featured at ICP.  And yet, I was surprised at myself for having such a snobby response…

The other notable thing about the ICP event was that it was inexplicably filled with a race of giants.  Okay, I am exaggerating a tad, but one of the artists must have a lot of Scandinavian friends or something because I’ve never been surrounded by so many six- or seven-footers in my life outside of Madison Square Garden.  Mind you, I’m not statuesque to begin with, but I felt positively elfin around these folks.  It was the exact opposite of how I might otherwise feel in Sicily or Chinatown.

This brings me up to Friday and the start of the weekend, but it’s time to go home from work.  So stay tuned until next time, when you’ll read about the concert I attended with Younger Brother, and how we both inadvertently had the chance to work on our respective enochlophobias.  Whee!

What’s the opposite of an ambulance chaser? 

The closest term to accurate that I could come up with was "ambulance fleer."  And this is precisely what my friend Miss M. and I saw the other night. 

We were walking back to my house from Dunkin’ Donuts at around midnight, up a street that is currently lined with sternum-high metal barricades (okay, sternum-high if you’re around my height!).  Across from us, we saw a pudgy, middle-aged, slightly spaced-out-looking guy in what appeared to be a jogging outfit.  He was jogging VERY slowly…so slowly in fact that it would not have been at all difficult for him to stop, or swerve, to avoid the barricades…but instead, he actually ran right smack into one of them!  Rather than just plowing through, he knocked it over, falling on top of it…then slowly, gingerly, picked himself up and looked around. 

We wondered if he was okay.  There was an ambulance coming, so we thought, "What luck!  Perhaps they can help him!"  In fact, they stopped quite near to him, and shined the light on him.  To our amazement, he actually began to jog, even slower than before, back in the opposite direction!  Was he an escaped mental patient or something?  There had been another ambulance parked further down the block, but I had no idea if this was connected.  Meanwhile, the ambulance made a U-turn (!) and continued to pursue the guy, but at an equally glacial pace.  It was positively surreal!  You can’t call it "hot pursuit" when a child on a scooter could easily have overtaken them…seriously, if the ambulance driver had just pulled over, parked, and chased the dude, the chase would have been over in minutes.  What was going on??? 

Miss M. and I had few speculations, but we agreed that it was definitely the weirdest thing either one of us had seen in a long time (and for me, that’s saying a lot).  You’ve heard of ambulance chasers, but now for the first time in my life, I’ve witnessed an ambulance fleer.

Epilogue: When recounting the story to my friend J., she wondered if the ambulance was even out looking for the fleer in the first place…as opposed to being out for some other reason and seeing him, then reasoning, "Well, we’re sure to get a call about this guy sooner or later, so we might as well pick him up now."

=========================================================================

Questions…Questions that need answering… (LOTR, yes I am a dork)

Why do ignorant people persist in going out of their way to eradicate all doubt as to said ignorance?

I could leave it at that, especially since it’s a question that crosses my mind on a regular basis.  However, the most recent occurrence was when I was on my way home from work on Friday.  Lots of people were waiting for the R train (I’d explain my old nickname for this train, but it really requires a visual explanation).  Some of these people, in fact, were so eager to climb aboard that they had completely blocked the egress of those wishing to disembark.  As a middle-aged woman pushed through, a stunning example of ignorance (in the form of two teenage girls) got hot and bothered.  "Excuse you!" yelled the one wearing the baby-tee that said No Money, No Car, No Chance in gold glitter.  Privately, I sided with the woman, but I almost always hesitate to speak out against people who exhibit such rude behavior because chances are, someone who’s rude enough to block everyone else’s commute probably also has few reservations against screaming at me and scratching me with their fake nails.  And especially lately, since I’ve had stress-related health problems, I have to consciously tell myself, "It’s not worth it," when I start to get annoyed.

But this time things were a little different: the woman yelled back (brava!).  This led to a brief shouting match, but I’m sure if the girls weren’t in a hurry to get wherever they were going, it could have dragged on.  As it was, they continued to curse about the woman once we all got on the train.  What really burns my toast is that this kind of rude, low-class person always wins the argument (or at least feels like they do) because they are too ignorant to let it go, or ever even consider that they stepped out of line.  The meek shall inherit the earth?  Not likely, unless someone engineers a plague that only infects people with bad manners…

=========================================================================

You’re Never Too Old

And speaking of the train, I was witness to a highly amusing conversation yesterday while on my way to the Italian film festival.  There were two older women (maybe in their 60s?) talking rather indiscreetly about some sort of hot tub party.  Apparently the tub was heart-shaped and there were at least 4 people in/around it.  The funniest part of the discourse concerned a Polaroid picture that one of the men took of his own penis.  The woman on the left apparently said something like, "I wanna see it!  Lemme see that!"  It just struck me as funny.  For one thing, if she was sitting there with a naked old man, she could see the penis in vivo, but perhaps there was some added value to actually taking a gander at the photo.  But mainly, the reason this anecdote seemed so humorous to me is that if you had a transcript of the conversation without knowing the age of the participants, you totally would have thought they were sorority girls or something.  Hey, I guess that just goes to show you that you’re never too old… 

Alternately, if you went to HCHS, it may have reminded you of a certain rumor going around about a hot tub party, sometime at the end of either junior or senior year…but I digress.

=========================================================================

Creepy Guy update:

I’ve seen him around or 3 more times since that weird incident a couple of weeks ago.  He keeps staring at me and I keep ignoring him.  A certain someone volunteered to go confront the guy, but I’d rather just leave it alone for now…mainly I’m concentrating on not letting him see where I live.  Hopefully, he will take the hint and piss off.  In the meantime, no Tea Lounge for me though!

=========================================================================

He’s a Good Man.  And Thorough.

Lastly, I have to go for more medical testing tomorrow.  I prefer to think that I’m not a sympathy ho, but your kind thoughts and well wishes are definitely appreciated.  Ciao for now…