Punk's Not Dead! It's just in semi-retirement.

To follow up yesterday's post about my 33-year-old husband, the one who got drunk at a house party, a bit of a plug for his punkrock band(s), one of which is playing TONIGHT!

Enjoy the musical stylings of "Xs for Eyes" at 10:30 or so at
The Continental (located just off the new & improved, de-punkrockified St. Marks Place, or St.MarksPlaceCorp)
New York City

Also on the lineup is a band called "Satirius Johnson." Love it. (If you listen to NPR, you get that.)

If you missed them at Arlene Grocery last week, P's other band, "Live Girls" will be playing tomorrow & every Wed. for a month or so at The Delancy Lounge in the Lower East Side.

Onstage nudity and/or impromptu pyrotechnics may be involved.

Try to turn away ...

Here is what I did this weekend.

Grab your insulin, kids. Cute in the extreme. Not for the faint-hearted.

It was a blissfully uneventful weekend. I took one step closer on the path to becoming a complete hermit. Sitting alone in my living room, doing absolutely nothing, is easily in the top 5 of my all-time favorite things. Does that make me some sort of freak? There's a fine line between "zen" and "autistic." Not sure if I've crossed it.

P went out on Saturday, and apparently had fun. He came home around 2 in the morning, after having enjoyed a few alcoholic beverages in the course of the evening. He asked that I write about it in my blog, so here goes:

Apparently, my 33-year-old husband *couldn't remember his address* when the taxi driver asked where he was going after leaving a "house party" in Williamsburg (as in, where the hipsters live in Brooklyn, not the Colonial re-enactment town where some dude dresses up like the village blacksmith, complete with leather breeches, as tourists look on; in NYC, we call that "Chelsea"). Anyway, taxi drivers can be rather cheeky, asking questions that are really none of their business, such as "where do you want me to take you?"

So, being too drunk to take a taxi, my 33-year-old husband had to take the subway. (Again - I'm recounting this tale at his request.) He got off the 6 train at 28th Street, thinking he'd gone too far. We live on 92nd Street, but this fact had, unfortunately, slipped his mind, along with the answer to the question "Is 92 greater than or less than 28?" Apparently, P then got into a deep, philosophical conversation with the station attendant about how to get home. Tapping the ruby slippers, alas, wasn't working.

"Get back on the train," said the fairy godstationattendant. "And take the train to the 86th Street Station. Then - and here's the tricky part - GET OFF."

See? The power was with you all along, only you didn't know that 86 comes AFTER 28.

Miraculously, P made it home in one piece, with all belongings in tow. I can't even manage to get home with even half of my belongings when stone-cold sober.

I don't think I've ever seen P so drunk, as he normally doesn't drink that much. It was very cute, in the way that a dog wearing one of those cones around its head is really cute. Cute, but you feel a twinge of guilt for thinking it's cute.

Here is an excerpt from our 2 a.m. converstion:

P: Help me take off my shoes.
(with some difficulty, I remove doc martin boots.)

A few minutes later:

P: Help me take off my shoes.

Me: Already did. See? (holding up a foot) No shoes.

P: Oh. Right. I mean ... help me take off my - thingy - take off my HMS Pinafore.

Me: Honey - you're not wearing a Gilbert & Sullivan light opera ...

P: Glub. (the sound of falling asleep while drinking a glass of water)


See, kids? Alcohol can cause you to mistake your socks for the score to an under-appreciated masterwork of musical theater.

Now THAT's the label they should put on cans of beer ...

99 Luft T-Shirts

How many shirts should one man own?

No, this isn't a Zen roan, or a lesser-known Peter Paul & Mary song. I'm really curious. How many?

The reason I ask is that today, I counted my husband's shirts. At least, I started to, but I stopped when I hit 99, before even getting to the closet.

This whole scenerio brings up some very disturbing questions.

1) why does one guy, who works in an office, need well over 100 shirts?
2) especially considering they all look more or less the same?
3) how lame does one's social life have to be for "Count Husband's Shirts" to make it to the top of your to-do list?

I was putting the shirts away because we recently did laundry. When I say "did laundry" of course I mean "did laundry" in the sense that I "cooked dinner" (that pizza didn't take itself out of the delivery box, after all).

To be precise, the laundry was delivered, folded, in neat, rectangular bags. This might sound strange, but we are in a city where, famously, you can have anything and everything delivered in an hour or less - from cat food to illegal drugs to transsexual midget hookers. Of course they'll deliver your underwear. (Some places are a one-stop call for all of these, but you have to know a pager number.)

Here, nobody has a washer or dryer, except for the filthy rich (who, ironically, are the only ones who aren't filthy b/c they can actually wash their clothes). So, to avoid spending all day in a laundromat, which is about as much fun as watching the UPN network, some nice people will come pick up your soiled laundry, and bring it back the next day, washed & neatly folded.

If you live in NYC, you think this is the most normal thing in the world. If you live virtually anywhere else, you probably think, quite rightly, that this is Why They Hate Us So Much.

The only problem with the "wash & fluff" (fluff? WTF?) is that they charge by the pound, so I've learned to wear my heavier clothes a little less often. Doing laundry can be very expensive, because my husband has about a million pounds of clothes. Unlike myself, he believes in actually washing things after he's worn them only one or seven times.

Personally, I'll wear same suit until it becomes threadbare without ever having it dry cleaned. I mean, really - why clean, when there's Febreeze? It gets out the odors, without ruining the filth. It's like being French, only without the smell. That is, you smell more like an artificial meadow and less like Drakkar Noir.

We don't have a proper laundry hamper, so we just kind of stack our (read: Paul's) dirty clothes in a pile in the corner of the bedroom. The general concept is that one of us calls J's Cleaners whenever "Mount St. Laundry" becomes taller than I am (in heels, that is). The other day, I knew it was time when one of the kittens was playing at the bottom of the pile, and it fell over, burying poor Seymour under a 5'6" pile of shirts and boxer shorts. Fortunately, he wasn't hurt. I'm not sure how I would have explained that to the vet. "See, Doc, it's like this ..."

Anyway. I got to wondering how many shirts P actually owns (I had the day off, and am clearly in need of a hobby). First, let me preface this story by stating that my husband is not what you would call a "Metrosexual" (would that he were...). THis is a man who has been known to get clothes out of dumpsters, without understanding why the argument "but, they were brand new!" doesn't make it okay.

Most of P's t-shirts (over 85 and counting in t-shirts alone) look, more or less, exactly alike. They come in various colors and feature logos of a full range of bands that have the word "Dead" in their names. Then there are the "ironic" t-shirts, like the one featuring a little kitten in sunglasses and pearls that says "Sex Kitten," or the "Where's The Beef" shirt from the Hart/Mondale campaign era, with the arrow pointing, suggestively, downward.

My question is, how many shirts is "too much"? Should I be worried? Seek professional help? Is there a book called Men Who Love Old T-Shirts Too Much and The Women Who Love Them (The Men - Not The T-Shirts, That Is ).

If not, I think I could write it. The funny thing is, in the entire time that P and I have been dating/married, I don't think I've known him to buy even one t-shirt. Maybe one or two he got as a gift, but should I be worried that he's secretly buying t-shirts on the street? Should I call Shirts Anonymous?

But seriously. How many shirts (t and otherwise) do most guys have? I'm really curious ...

Yesterday, I divided my time between hugging the toilet bowl, wretching, and lying on the cold tile of the bathroom floor.

"Hangover" is really not the word. No, "hangover" is a cute little euphamism that you just couldn't use to describe my condition ... They need a stronger word. Hangunder? A cocktail of hangover and despair, topped off with a squirt of utter mortification, just for that extra edge.

While lying on the floor of the bathroom, moaning, I was visited by three ghosts. First was the Ghost of Hangover Past (she looked a bit like Debby Harry). The ghost took my hand and led me to a streetcorner in Paris, where I was barfing into a trash can at 2 in the afternoon, shaking like a leaf after drinking about 20 styrofoam cups of cold red wine at Mr. Goodfast Pizza the night before.

Then I was on a Strassenbahn in Germany, age 19, somewhere in wine country, after consuming a bottle of wine after having half a Twix bar for breakfast. I threw up all over the Strassenbahn (a sort of streetcar). A Polizei came over and said that it was strictly verboten to rolf on the Strassenbahn, that I would have to pay a steep fine. My friends and I got off the Strassenbahn in the middle of a field somewhere and hid behind a trash can, while the Polizei ran after us, yelling Schnell, Schnell, or something suitably WW2-film-ish.

Then, the Ghost took me back to a very yellow hotel room in Dublin. I was 23. The hotel room was very, very yellow, and my mind was unravelling, slowly. I was happy, but not all that happy, to be alive after the amounts of substances I had consumed. It was not good.

All of a sudden I was in New York, 24 or 25, when I was dating Laurent, or was it Laurent? Either one, I was cat-sitting for a French friend and somehow got drunk (following a party at 95 Second Avenue) and barfed in her laundry hamper. I didn't realize this until she discovered it upon her return. I think I mistook it for a toilet, which, you must admit, is a perfectly natural mistake. Unfortunately I was drinking red wine, so the laundry was ruined, as was a budding friendship.

Fast forward a few years, to an event called the "Big Hair Ball." I'd dyed my hair bright pink earlier that day, just for the theme-based party. I was also wearing a tutu dress. The night ended with me rolling around on the floor of my friend's living room in tutu, covered in bright pink dye from where my hair bled onto the rest of me.

Then it was October, 2001, and I guess everyone in New York was a bit freaked out in those days, so we drank and drank and puked and puked; no particular date in mind, but that whole month - drinking and puking. We didn't know what else to do, so we partied. It seemed like a good solution. I've never been to so many parties - I'm not even sure whose they were. I seem to remember there were a lot of Italians involved - people I didn't know before and haven't known since.

Then, it was time for the grand finale montage sequence - a steady stream of Halloweens and New Year's Eves and birthdays and Arbor Days, all rolled up into one.

And yet, Tuesday night was a bit worse than all of the above. That's what I learned from The Ghost of Hangover Present. I was going through that terrible, terrifying moment of trying to remember what all I'd said/done the night before, but mostly, it wasn't coming back. Based on the fact that I barfed in the flowerbox in front of my building, I'm thinking it's a safe bet that it was not good.

Me= mortified. Oh, the horror, the horror ...

On the Upper East Side, barfing in flowerboxes is distincly frowned upon. People in this neighborhood have never barfed in their lives, much less on rhododhendrums in a public space. I'm sure I'd have been arrested if I weren't so ridiculously white. Wearing (possibly for the last time) a searsucker suit.

So, as I was lying there on the bathroom floor, sinking deep into this pit of despair, kind of like Alice's rabbit hole, I finally reached that mythical point where you fall so far into the hole that you actually come out the other side. Lying there on the bathroom floor, naked, in a pool of my own vomit, I realized - this is not a good look for me anymore. I decided to stop drinking, for once and for all.

It's not like I drink every day or anything like that, but I have a ridiculously low tolerance for alchohol. You might say it makes me crazy. I'm talking Cuh-RAY-ZEE. Margot Kidder/Anne Heche/"Insane Marguerite Posse" crazy. It is distinctly NOT GOOD.

I think, like most people who are inherently socially awkward and nervous in most social situations, alchohol is one of those things that helps me feel more comfortable, less tounge-tied, or something. I never know what to say at parties; I never know what to do with my hands. It's like I become the socially retarded reject I was between the ages of 12 and (how old am I now?) all over again.

However, the net result is feeling much, much, much more like an idiot, only the next morning. Unfortunately, the part of the brain that tells you when you've had enough to drink seems to be defective, in my case. Sometimes it works, but far too often it does not.

Still, I'm absolutely horrified by my behavior, and am quite sure my friends/acquaintances think I'm stark raving mad, although no doubt they've all seen me Behaving Badly before. It's sort of been a theme. But at least the silver lining is that I've finally realized that it's time for me to grow up and stop Behaving Badly. In fact, you might say it's long overdue.

As for the Ghost of Hangover Future, I won't even go into it ...

SearsucKAH!

Yesterday was our one-month wedding anniversary. I can't believe it's been a month already! It seems like only four weeks ago ...

Today, I'm wearing my brand-new searsucker pantsuit, purchased in Jacksonville. It's the new "Colonel Sanders" look. It's finger-lickin' hot, to paraphrase Paris Hilton.

Yes, searsucker. It's part of a recent trend of me reluctantly embracing my Inner WASP. I've long been a self-hating WASP, having grown up among painfully preppy suburbanites, but lately I've decided that I should just give up and learn to love the docksiders (without socks, of course). And the headband (bright pink, with little green whales on it). I draw the line, however, at the braided belt. Sigh.

The problem with WASPs is that we are not a funny race. When we are funny, it's more in the accidental sense, i.e., "those plaid golf pants look kind of funny with that lime green Izod shirt."

To wit, the list of WASP comedians is about as long as the list of "Dexy's Midnight Runners" top-40 hits. Even the ones who seem WASPy usually turn out to be Catholic or Jewish or Branch Davidians. Why? Because being a WASP is a serious business. When you've got the (inexplicably) dominant weltanshaung of a culture, it has to be protected at all costs. It becomes a "way of life," as in the Am'erkin Way of Life, and that must be exhalted and shielded from humor or terrorism. It's not that WASPs never laugh; we enjoy a good episode of Full House as much as anybody else. However, our collective sense of irony is just not terribly nuanced.

When I was 15, I met my first (and only) Catskills comedian, and decided that I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. I didn't realize that working the Catskills was an unlikely career ambition if you happen to be any of the following: a WASP, Southern, female, or born after 1945. I was solidly all of the above. Not only had I never been to the Catskills, I didn’t even know what a Catskill was. Still don’t.

“Is that, like, a Siamese who knows how to flush a toilet?” I asked the comedian, rolling around laughing at my joke, which, in the true tradition of My People, was not funny at all.

I'd like to continue, but must get back to writing grants. Why? Because that is what I do for a living. Sigh. Will pick back up tomorrow ...

seymour poses for his new album cover

Neanderthals, etc.

I would say more about post-wedding depression, but it's just too depressing. It's like I'm suddenly realizing all these things that suck that I just didn't have the time or inclination to notice before. At the same time, I know all of the things I'm internally whining about are really profoundly trivial, and I'm incredibly lucky on most levels and deeply grateful for all the many good things in my life, including but not limited to my two NEW KITTENS!!!!! New kittens!!!!

Still, my job leaves much to be desired, in part because there are no kittens in my office, although there are mice, 2 other persons, and the occasional well-fed roach. I should be glad that I'm doing something to help humanity by working for a nonprofit, but at the end of the day, I'm just not a do-gooder. I feel pretty sure that would require owning a pair of clogs. I would much prefer to serve the world by spreading irony to the masses, which ironically, is ironic, considering my job is 99.9% Irony Free.

I really want a new job. "Fund development" is an insanely boring profession. Sometimes I try to work something non-serious into grants and/or "individual solicitation letters" (asking folks for money, in nonprofit lingo). My theory is that it would actually wake up the poor sucker who's forced to read the government grant.

"So, a priest, a rabbi and the world's fastest man walk into this nonprofit literacy program ..."

Maybe not. Still, you could train a neanderthal to write grants, assuming they still existed. If they did, I'm sure there would be a nonprofit dedicated to training Persons of Caves to do things that the rest of us prefer not to do.

Speaking of Cave Persons ...

Apparently, they've discovered that, about 40,000 years ago, "single cave in France was home to Neanderthals, modern humans, and hyenas."

Thus giving rise to the very first "reality show." See, when they say a single cave ... they mean that all the inhabitants were also single. Not to mention hip and trendy,living in a cave dwelling, a.k.a. "duplex loft, low light, w/panoramic view of hyena den" according to the neolithic real estate brokers.

The tension mounts when Gror, 22, Neanderthal/Account Executive, butts heads with Kelly, 19, Hyena/Actress/Model/Whatever, when she leaves half-eaten corpses of antelope on the coffee table. Tension further mounts when Rolk, 25, Early-Human/Hunter-Gather Executive gets the hots for Gror's girlfriend, who then kills Kelly and eats her for dinner, partly because Kelly broke the alliance in voting Gror out of the cave, but mostly just because hyenas are just tasty.

Franny and Seymour, Part 2

Okay, I promise not to become one of those people who talks incessantly about their cats. It's one of those one-sided conversations, kind of like when people tell you about the cute things their 6-week-old babies do. And then, little Cody got the cutest expression on his face right after he went #2, and ...

Kittens, like new babies, are very cute. However, there's an inverse relationship between what a new parent/new cat owner thinks is the most adorable and fascinating thing in the world, and how interesting everyone else things it is, which is typically not at all.

Of course, Franny and Seymour are an exception to this rule because they are so cute. Everyone in the world is no doubt waiting to hear stories like, "the other day - ohmigod, you're gonna love this - the other day, the kittens were sitting there, and then they started playing with each other, and one jumped up on the other one and (laughing) ... it was hilarious. Wasn't it? Oh. I gues you had to be there."

On that note, P just posted a new picture of the kittens on his blog.

We just had the debate about whether or not to potty train our cats. I'm pro, but P noted that he doesn't want to come home from work and have to wait for the bathroom while the kittens sit on the toilet and read "Cat Fancy." He has a point.

Franny and Seymour

This weekend, P and I adopted two very cute kittens, a brother and sister. Just in time, some nice Australian lady invented this.

Good English major nerds that P and I both are, we of course named our cats after characters from Salinger stories. Yes, it was Franny and Zooey, but, as a close reading of the Cliff's Notes reveals, Seymour was also Franny's (older, suicidal) brother. Franny's other other brother was Buddy, the narrarator & moral arbeiter , ahem, of the tales. But having grown up in Jacksonville, I have known far too many people by the name Buddy, although none of them were moral arbiters. Mostly they were exterminators, local politicians, or kids who pulled tails off geckos for fun. Which Salinger's Buddy might have done as well, although it is never overtly stated in the text.

I would post picutres of the kittens, but I'm not sure how to do so, much in the way that I don't know how to make "links" on the sidebar to other blogs, as every time I attempt to do I seem to erase the "comments" feature from the blog, which frustrates the readers of this blog. Both of them.

P.A.D.D.S. - Treatment and Cure

I think both my husband (that will sound right, eventually) and I are suffering from Post-wedding Affective Depression Disorder Syndrome (PADDS). Scientists are not yet sure about the actual cause of PADDS, although scientific research indicates that it could be a fungus. Or not.

Fortunately, there is help. In the barbaric past, one might have said "this is a normal phase, and happens to a lot of people. You'll get over it." In these more enlightened times, we know that PADDS is real, because it has been scientifically proven to be an actual acronym. And there is now a rubber wrist bracelet and a ribbon-shaped magnet to add to the back of the SUV in support of this heartbreaking disorder.

I'm going to ask my doctor about new Yease(TM), from PhiCo. It helps treat a variety of symptoms that, until now, had to be treated by a whole cabinet full of messy ointments. It's a one-stop cure for temporary relief of irritable bowel syndrome, yeast infections, toenail fungus, AD/HD, hypochondria, depression, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), PADDS, mental insanity, and occasional rectal bleeding.*





* side effects may include: irritable bowels, yeast infections, toenail fungus, depression, hypochondria, rectal bleeding, and mental insanity. May have sexual side effects, including but not limited to a sudden, unexplainable attraction to mature billy goats. In a small number of cases** may cause hallucinations of jumping "into the technicolor hell dimension" followed by sudden, self-inflicted death.

** but only in a tiny, small percentage of less than 85% of all cases.

Bird's eye view

Click here to read some of the inside scoop on the wedding extravaganza, from the POV of my dear friend & maid (matron?) of honor April.

At one point, April refers to one of the more disturbing moments of the whole weekend, when the photographer, Alex, had apparently been smoking crack and asked for some oyster crackers to throw in the wind to attract seagulls, so that they would soar around elegantly (like in one of those inspirational posters often found in the break rooms of corporate offices, with quotes related to teamwork and "soaring to achieve customer satisfaction" and such). From a distance, seagulls are poetic and inspirational. Up close, seagulls are mean, disease-ridden birds who crap like it's their job - which it pretty much is.

Fortunately, the seagulls didn't crap on us, but one of them came close enough to put an eye out, dive-bombing to grab three whole crackers in one sortie. Those f*ckers loves them some oyster crakers.

It was very inspirational. I felt inspired to learn to operate a pellet gun. I haven't seen the photos yet, but we might have to superimpose an inspirational slogan at the bottom of each one.

More later this afternoon ...