My Parasites & Me

I think I’ve found a way to get my HMO cover the cost of the impractical pink lamé shoes I bought the other day. You see, I’ve just found out that this purchase, like so many others, might be related to a colony of fun-loving parasites living in my brain.

Recently, several articles have appeared in various publications about T-gondii, microscopic parasites that inhabit the brains of about half the people in this country. At first I said EEeeeeeew!, but then I read the symptoms ...

T gondii is the parasite that causes Toxoplasmosis, which I thought was perhaps what causes infected men to run out and buy a plasma TV. In a bizarre twist, that's not far from the truth.

Most people who have toxoplasmosis, it seems, have few - if any - noticable symptoms. However, some scientists have observed distinct patterns of personality traits among those who are infected with the parasites, which seem to affect men and women rather differently. According to some researchers, these parasites make women want to go shopping, and make men less likely to groom themselves.

For instance, Professor Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague has discovered some evidence that infection by intracellular protozoan parasite toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii)can actually alter the personalities of those infected. He found the women infected with toxoplasma spent more money on clothes and were consistently rated as more attractive. “We found they were more easy-going, more warm-hearted, had more friends and cared more about how they looked,” he said. “However, they were also less trustworthy and had more relationships with men.”

On the other hand, infected men tended to pay less attention to their personal grooming habits, and more quick to fight. They were also more jealous than other men. “They tended to dislike following rules,” Flegr said in one interview.

Lemme get this straight ...


They make women like to shop, wear makeup, and have sex with lots of different men. And it causes men -- the same men who can easily fashion a working computer out of a coffee pot, a Furbee and a digital watch (really - this can be done)-- to be utterly flummoxed by the concept of using an iron. And makes them physiologially incapable of asking for directions.

In other words, they've finally discovered the cause of heterosexuality.

The funny thing about this virus is that it starts in rats, causing them to have an inexplicable attraction to cats. The rats loose the instinct to fear cats, so the cats eat the rats, which are a Trojan Horse, getting the intracellular protazoa into the host they really wanted all along (the cats, not ancient Troy). The effects on humans are totally secondary, but somewhat similar - after all, human brains and rat brains -- according to people who, unlike me, did not cheat their way through AP Biology -- are structurally rather similar, as demonstrated in studies conducted on current White House cabinet members.

Women infected with T Gondii, in particular, seem to be more fearless. Not only are they not afraid of rats, they actually date them. But a girl can't help it.

They say that 50% of the population in the U.S., and closer to 80% in France (buht of corze!) and Germany are infected. Are we heading towards a future full of promiscuous, well-dressed women living alongside poorly groomed men with a jealous streak? And if this is true, how will we tell???

Will our bad behavior be excused with doctor's note?

"Honey, it wasn’t me – I didn’t want to buy all those clothes at Bergdorf's, but I had to have something to wear for when I went to that hotel to meet all your friends to make that video that's been going around the internet. It's not like a wanted to, but my parasites, you know how randy they get after I go shopping ..."

One of the best things about being married or in a long-term relationship is that you don't feel any great pressure to be doing something cool on a Friday night. Tonight, for example, I am posting pictures of lasagna on the internet.

You see, I just figured out how to post photos on a blog! I realize this should not be so difficult, and yet ...I thought maybe you had to host them on one of those other internets. Besides, I never post photos of myself because in virtually every photo ever taken of me, food seems to be falling out of my mouth. Even when I'm not eating at the time the photo was taken. It's rather odd. So I figured I'd just cut to the chase and post photos of the food.

The above is my mother-in-law's amazing lasagna, which she prepared on our recent visit to San Luis Obispo. Vita's parents both came from Sicily, and so her lasagna and red sauce come from some 500-year-old family recipe. Sigh. I wish I were Mediterranian.


The morning after said lasagna. Paul always waits until I have no makeup on and am in mid-sentence and/or am chewing to take pictures.


Here is a great picture of me, except that I'm not in it. Scenic Morro Bay in CA.



Me and Francis, pre-op, when he was still Frances (in July), before we found out he'd have to be neutered instead of spayed.


Paul and kittens, which are now cats, but I can't find the new photos. The gist of it is: they're bigger.


One last San Luis Obispo picture from Xmas. I like how every picture in california involves a "vista." Growing up in a flat part of the world, I'm totally amazed by mountains. Maybe it's just boob envy.

"I"m a deeply shallow person"

- Andy Warhol

I’m sorry if I’m in a bad mood, but it’s that time of month. By that, I mean - the end of it. The time when my ATM receipt reads “Available Balance: $1.27.” You see, at my new job I only get paid once a month, which is both good and bad. That is, it’s good for local retailers, but bad for me personally. At the beginning of the month, when I have plenty of cash, I go into Barney's and think, "$175 for a jar face cream? Gee, I can't afford not to buy two!" Three and a half weeks later, I go into the grocery store and think, "$1.19 for a can of tuna? Who do they think we are, Rockefellers?" So instead I buy the discount brand tuna that "may contain pork bi-products."

Around the 26th of every month, the ATM becomes my nemesis. I have this whole imaginary conversation with the receipt, which seems to form an origami mouth that hovers in mid-air, talking to me.

Your own fault, you know… the receipt tells me. Its voice is strangely reminiscent of KITT, the surly Trans Am from “Knight Rider.” (Unrelated question: was KITT supposed to be gay? By that, I mean NO offense to the gay Trans Am community - some of my best friends are gay cars. I’m just saying, it just seemed like they gave KITT a bit of an ‘exasperated waiter’ inflection. I was a little kid at the time, so I don’t really remember the premise of the show - clearly thought up by someone inhaling giant piles of blow - but it might have actually been “Can a straight man and a gay car live together in the same apartment?”) Anyway.

Shoulda managed your money better, my receipt says, in a tisk-tisk tone.

What do you know, you’re just a receipt!

There’s really no need to make this personal, the receipt counters. If you don’t like receipts, well, that’s your issue.

That’s not true! I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t – I – you know, some of my best friends are bank receipts.

Anyway ...

I love luxury items. But I mean really love – in that deep-down sense; the simple, unambiguous pleasure that only comes from extremely shallow things. Being shallow gets a bad wrap, because there are people who actually judge others on, say, the kind of shoes they wear or what kind of car they drive. This is of course stupid and wrong. If you have to judge people at all, it should be on the basis of their personal integrity, and/or their handbags. Just kidding, of course. Personal integrity is way overrated.

Okay, even if you don't want to admit it, you've probably felt the blood-lust that comes from wanting a certain stupid, ridiculous item, be it clothing, a car, or, say, a flat-panel 37-inch television so that you can play your video games in HDTV, even though you're almost 34 and your wife would rather have a new bed, which you could have gotten for the same price (love you, honey). For instance, you never want anything in the way you want a specific outfit when you're a teenage girl. She will remember every detail of The Outfit (however ridiculous it will inevitably seem in future decades) long after she’s forgotten the last name of the boy whose attention she hoped to get by wearing it. I was talking with my mother-in-law, Vita, about this during our recent trip to California. She was telling me about a “winter white” wool skirt suit that she got for Christmas when she was 16. That year, winter white was what all the girls had to have. The way she described it, I could feel how much she wanted that suit, and how happy – how relieved she must have been when she finally got it. Although we don’t like to admit it, urgency of the “must have” item du jour applies just as much to the soi-disant "smart" girls (read: no boobs) such as myself who spent their free time in high school writing ironic essays about Ionesco, perhaps to make up for lack of cleavage.

Vita is one of the more intelligent and unpretentious people you’re likely to meet, so it was nice to know that even women like her go ga-ga over clothes as teenagers. I sort of never graduated out of that phase (I think the technical term is "maturity"). The women in my family are all Southern, and hence we all pretty much live for "puttin' on the dog" (getting all gussied up). I think this phrase must have originated when some lady in Georgia, after a few afternoon drinks (it's fo' o'clock somewhah, darlin'), mistook her terrier for a mink stole.

I know it's silly, but I love walking home up Madison Avenue, so that I can press my face up against the windows of the boutiques (no, I don't mean metaphorically), staring at the dazzling, ridiculously expensive clothes. Even though can’t afford them, I’m genuinely glad that somebody can. There’s something comforting about knowing that there are women out there who can go into Bergdorf's and try on that silk and alumninum ball gown - the kind of thing that makes no sense except in a store window - and actually buy it. More importantly, they have somewhere to wear it.

The other day, at Barney’s, I fell in love with a navy blue, see-thru knit sundress. There are many things wrong with this concept, but they were negated by the fact that if you looked closely, you might have noticed that the scallops along the hem of the dress were actually the wings of upside-down dragonflies, woven into the fabric. It would have been the perfect thing to wear at a semi-formal pool party (?) where nobody was actually going in a pool, on an evening that was not too cold (knit, after all) nor too hot (hello, see-thru?), where nobody was offended by partial nudity, in a world where I had much bigger boobs and smaller thighs.

A bargain, really, at $2,000. The thing is, if you can afford that dress, you know where that party is.

Back in the real world, I don’t have anywhere to wear a see-though knit sundress. Nor do I have $2,000. But, hello – dragonflies!

I didn’t buy the dress, of course. But I take comfort in knowing that someone knows where that party is, and she’s going to wear that dress. And she will look out over the shallow pool, among shallow people, and she will know that the bottom of her dress, know that there are dragonflies hiding, upside down ... spinning in infinity, I say hey, hall-e-lu-jah ...

The Picaresque (not a new, hot band, although maybe it should be)

The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a private history to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the person are concealed, and on this account we must be content to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing sheet, and take it just as he pleases.

- from the author's preface to Moll Flanders.

To add to the whole discussion about whether or not the actual life experiences of an author are relavant to the text, and in response to econoclast's comment about Daniel Defoe framing his novels as "true stories," I decided to re-read "Moll Flanders," which is my favorite Defoe novel. To be honest, I'm not sure if Defoe posited (DISCLAIMER: being in English-major-dork mode, I am required to say "he posited" when in fact I mean "he said") that the stories were really-truly real, or just "real," wink-wink. I could research it, but if memory serves, I'm inclined to go with the latter. I studied the early novel rather extensively in college, but at the time I also enjoyed many recreational pharmaceuticals, which might have caused me to confuse Daniel Defoe with Willem Defoe, or for that matter caused me to confuse the oeuvre of Daniel Defoe with my left buttock. (Not that I would grossly exaggerate about my use of drugs, because that would be wrong. I was, however, in prison in 3 states, unlike that liar James Frey. Hence the tear I have tattooed under my eye, for the homeys I cut down in prison).

Daniel Defoe clearly wanted Moll Flanders to be sympathetic and taken seriously, which she remains despite her "thieving and whoring." Moll Flanders is a classic of the picaresque tradition, which is one of my all-time favorites. For those of you who might not be familiar with the picaresque, because you were smart enough to study subjects that might allow you to "get a real job," and "have more than $1.27 in net assets," a picareque novel is essentially a story in which a social underdog type travels around and has varied adventures, while offering a satirical commentary on the events and people he/she encouters. In Defoe's novels in particular, the main character always achieves a kind of redemption, usually of a religious nature, in the end.

What occured to me is that novelists and "memoirists" like James Frey and JT Leroy are, essentially, the direct heirs to the 17th-century picaresque. Their characters are margnialized by addiction, cross-dressing, prostitution, or all of the above; they travel around the United States and act as the moral arbiters (ahem)of their circumstances. Leroy's oeuvre, which is just a stupid French world for "oeuvre," would have been a biting commentary on child prostitution in West Virginia, or something, if only it were even remotely true. (While the author never said these stories were nonfiction, the idea that it was based on actual life experiences was strongly implied by the author, publisher, and others.)

The moral salvation which occurs at the end of either Leroy or Frey's works (either through rehab, or moving in with a social worker and her cross-dressing husband, etc.) simply reinforces the eerie ties between these novels and Defoe's picaresque. Defoe, after all, was raised and educated by puritans, and Moll Flanders spends a part of her time in the plantations in the new colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Because Defoe's father was a Dissenter (essentially, a Puritan), and even though he was as English as bad teeth, I would posit that, in a sense, his were not just among the first novels, but among the first American novels. (As an aside, it's like how Modern American English is structurally more similar to 17th c. English than Modern British patterns of speech, in the way that people in Montreal or Dakkar sound more like 17th c. Frenchmen than the modern French, because the language in the colonies remained more attached to this older structure.) The structure and sensibility of Defoe's works was even a moral and aesthetic precursor to 21st Century American televison and film. For instance, Moll Flanders arguably has a 3-act structure, sort of like, say, Pretty Woman, and other feel-good hooker/drug addict/gruff-but-lovable football coach movies. So begins tradition of the "very important lesson" that Arnold or Willis has to learn on every episode of "Differ'nt Strokes."

Defoe's novels were popular, in part, because he exposed the "underbelly" of society. Fortunately for him, they didn't have a lot of editorial fact checkers in the 17th/18th centuries. I'm pretty sure that any actual women in Moll Flanders' circumsatnces in that time and place would have had a much less riviting, much more drudgery-filled existance, and probably died of syphillis or consumption long before she achieved fame and fortune enough to look back on it all and have a moral epiphany. The details of Defoe's characters' lives were rather racy for the time, and even now, in parts, they read like pulp fiction. But the important thing, for Defoe, was the rather simplistic (and very puritanical) redemption the characters must experience in the end. In JT Leroy's case, this redemtion is mostly extra-textual (not to be confused with "extra-terrestrial"), because we're to believe that the "real" character is actaully now living with a couple and their child in San Francisco (which is true, as she's the 40-year-old housewife/mother in this scenerio).

Although we all like the idea that a novel or story should exist on its own merit, sometimes the text interacts with fictions that are outside the actual text (or, "extra-terrestrial"), to the extent that the author's persona becomes somehow central to the denouement. Which of course is just a pretentious French word for "denouement."

On a web site called Bookslut, someone named Litsa Dremousis says:

It was two years ago, the night I finished Sarah, LeRoy's 2000 tale of a boy who becomes a "lot lizard" (truck stop whore) to compete with his mother, assuming her identity in the mouths and arms of tricks. In his quest for a bigger raccoon bone (a signal to others of his prowess as a whore) "Cherry Vanilla" endures rape, beatings, and the ritual shearing of his hair. Abandoned by his mother and forsaken by his pimp, he is alone and desecrated because he had the hubris to want a better life. I sobbed until I threw up.

Hyperbolic, much? Litsa then goes on to tell us:

LeRoy's reviews are uniformly spectacular, but reporters fixate on his friendships with Madonna and Winona Ryder, his penchant for female attire, and his years as a prostitute. Insightful readers, though, tune out the hype like so much static. They know LeRoy's work is the stuff of cave painters -- ash and blood -- and that he crawls through the same dark, jagged spaces to create.

AND YET ... when it comes to her first question for the author (in a telephone interview, of course), her FIRST question - and clearly the one she most urgently needs answered, is: Did you guys have a wrap party for the film ["The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things"]?

HELLO? Your FIRST QUESTION is about a celebrity party that has nothing to do with the "ash and blood" of the novel you SOOOOO love! OMG! What is this, Tiger Beat? Of course, "Leroy" doesn't seem vexed, but is quick to note that Chloe Sevigny did get past the bouncers, even though they wanted to keep her out. I hate to say it, but Laura Albert is a fcuking genius. Not a genius as a writer, by any stretch, but she should sell this shit to the Guggenheim as a big, weird, strangely beautiful "installation."

I could go on and on on the subject, but I won't. I was really hankering to go off on JT Leroy/ Laura Albert's position as a woman-as-man-wanting-to-be-a-woman as it relates to "l'ecriture feminine" and post-structuralist feminist thought on language and identity, but I restrained myself, thankyouverymuch.

Next time, I promise to go back to writing about frivilous sh*t, such as why I don't have any money left this month.

J.K. Rowling's "Hogwarts" exposed as a fake ...

I'm becoming downright disillusioned. First, we find out that James Frey is a serial exaggerator. Then, we find out that JT Leroy isn't really a dude pretending to be a woman pretending to be a Boy George impersonator.

NOW they tell me that J.K. Rowling, author of the "Harry Potter" series, didn't really discover a magical boarding school where precocious wizards-in-training fight the forces of evil. And to think that I actaully cared when Dumbledore died! Had I known it was fiction, I wouldn't have given a rat's ass. Now I'm going to have to retract those harshly worded letters I wrote to my senators about the looming threat of He Who Must Not Be Named.

Confession: I am the real JT Leroy

If you've already received your latest copy of Transsexual Drug Addict Literary Weekly (dba,The New York Times), you were undoubtedly shocked and dismayed to learn that, last week, not one but two supposed strung-out literary boy wonders were exposed to be, tragically, much less fcuked up than they claimed.

First, we find out that Oprah’s pet addict du jour, James Frey, wasn’t 100% honest about the details of his life as an outlaw who was “wanted in three states” (ahem, for outstanding parking tickets). He spent a few hours in jail, instead of a few months. Instead of being addicted to crack, he *technically* meant he was “addicted” to “those cinnamon raisin scones at Starbucks, which are so yummy, they’re like crack.” And he also lied about the part where he said he was a dude, but in fact he’s a 40-year-old mother and housewife. Oops – wait a minute. That was JT Leroy.

As it turns out, the "gender-blurring wunderkind" JT Leroy was neither transgendered, nor male, nor 17 when he wrote his first novel, nor a former child prostitute pimped out to truckers in rural West Virginia. The real author of the novels is, by all evidence, a mother and housewife named Laura Albert, whose knowledge of cross-dressing child prostitutes in West Virgina truck stops might have been loosely based on a very special episode of "The Dukes of Hazard."

As a real transsexual drug addict and former truck stop prostitute, I find this revelation particularly offensive. Coincidentally, my story is more or less the exact inverse of JT Leroy’s. See, I’m actually a 17-year-old MTF ex-junky from West Virginia, pretending to be a 30-ish married woman on the Upper East Side of New York.

Because I am, in fact, a 17-year-old former prostitute, I could see a lot of inconsistencies in the work of JT Leroy. Critics had the literary equivalent of a cheap orgasm over Leroy’s novels and stories, calling them “real” and “brutally accurate” and “ooooh! I felt just like I was back in the truck stop in West Virginia!” Of course, the author (whomever he or she may be) was banking on the fact that about 100% of the people who read art-house fiction have never, ever been to a truck stop in West Virgina – and they never will. For all Dave Eggers knows, there could be an entire subculture of redneck truckers who get off on fcuking 12-year-old boys dressed up like plush female aardvarks. No, wait, Dave – get this – they also drug these kids and they steal – I mean, they eat their kidneys (deep fried, of course – we know how dem Suth’ners are …) while having sex with them!

For all Dave knows, this is a growing crisis that should be addressed by a Congressional Task Force. Of course, if any of Leroy’s readers had ever worked a truck stop in West Virginia (and remember – I have), a few inconsistencies might’ve jumped out at them. For one thing, in his novel, Sarah, one of the main characters is his pimp who turns out to be an all ‘round great guy. As a 17-year-old transgendered prostitute, I’ve had plenty of pimps, and I can assure you that they never, ever have a “heart of gold.”

But even if I were a 31-year-old married woman living in New York, which I certainly am not, you’d think I might be able to figure that out. Another red flag comes from the question of how a homeless kid who left middle school to become a prostitute has such advanced expository writing skills, not to mention a broad knowledge of the works of literary-elite authors such as Mary Gaitskill and Dennis Cooper. He does at least make an effort to explain this, telling us that his San Francisco johns influenced his literary tastes. (WTF???)

Okay, again – even if I were a heterosexual woman who had never been an underage prostitute - a big "if" - I might at least suspect that men who are paying for sex in public restrooms aren’t all that interested in sticking around to discuss Schopenhauer in the afterglow. I mean, I’ve heard of a literary whore, but this is taking it a bit too far.

Women writing under men’s names is nothing new – George Eliot, George Sands, and now, by the looks of “JT Leroy,” Boy George. Laura Albert, writing a fiction about truck stop prostitution in West Virginia, however “brilliant” and “honest” it may be, would probably never have been published in the first place had it been known that she was a 30-something educated, heterosexual woman and not a homeless, transgendered 16-year-old.

It’s a tired, cliché question from Lit 101 class – does the identity and biography of the artist matter, or does art exist on its own merit? In theory, if JT Leroy or James Frey’s work is so "honest," and "beautiful," what the hell difference does it make if any of it ever happened? (Of course, it should be noted that JT Leroy never claimed that his/her work was anything other than fiction, although the persona created around the author was clearly a huge part of the author’s mystique, because most of his "fans," such as Courtney Love, never read his books; in Courtney's case she has the excuse that she doesn't actually know how to read.)

The realpolitik of the current publishing world is that packaging and marketing is a an integral extention, if not actually a part of the work itself. These days, the “truth,” no matter how contrived, seems to have more merit than a work of the imagination. But we don’t want real reality, we want the sexier, better-looking kind that only fiction can create. And an integral part of the fiction is that it must sustain the illusion of “reality;” In other words, we insist on reality, but only in quotation marks. James Frey, after all, couldn’t even sell his novel about a drug addict, but he made $5 million re-packaging the same text as the “truth.”

We don’t care what the truth is; we know we’re being lied to constantly; we want to be lied to. We like it. More to the point, we insist on it. People just don’t approve when confronted with the distasteful notion that “the truth” is, in fact, in quotation marks. Case in point: the unabashedly fictionalized Weapons of Mass Destruction that led to the war in Iraq. They didn’t even try very hard to cover up the fact that it was all a lie, because they knew that we had given our consent to be lied to. Fortunately, Saddam Hussein never claimed to be a transsexual prostitute, or there might have been more of a scandal.

I'm going to get up at 5:30 in the morning, and meditate, do some yoga, and then sit down and churn out several chapters of thoughtful and salient prose before running around the resevoir in Central Park, after which I will enjoy a bowl of homemade muesli in front of the windowsill as I watch the sun rise over the alternate universe in which I might get around to doing such a thing.

But, seriously - tomorrow I am getting up early. Mark my words. I'm going to do all the stuff I've been meaning to do for the past month/decade. I'm going to write meaningful handwritten letters to long-lost friends, on paper that I fashion by hand from colorful scraps of paper that are already lying around the house. This would take about 1/203344th the amount of time I spend developing an ulcer and biting myself (it's a thing) over not ever keeping in touch with people due to lack of artistic homemade stationary.

The thing is, the longer you wait to write letters, emails, etc. the more perfect and delightful they really have to be, to make up for their lateness.

This is one reason why I still haven't finished writing the thank you notes for our wedding gifts. The ones I've put off are the those for which I wanted to write an extra-special note to express my gratitude.

A haiku:

asparagus tongs
grasping the delicious stalks
I want to eat them.


I decided that if I could churn out an actual sonnet for each gift, the lateness would be forgiven. Unfortunatley, here's not much that rhymes with "3-speed blender." Maybe a limerick? Heck, if I could churn out a villanelle - that would so trump the whole late thing.

Regardless, I'm going to get up early in the morning and do stuff. Paul laughs as I say that, because, of course, I say it every night, and every morning I sleep until 8:15 and then eat breakfast while showering and getting dressed, all at the same time. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results. Although, technically, I think the clinical definition of insanity has something to do with writing a haiku about aspargus tongs.

Galette des Rois

One of my new year's resolutions is to blog more often. It was either that or "get out of debt" or "go to the gym regularly" or "volunteer to help the less fortunate." Aftr some deliberation, I settled on 1) blogging more and 2) enjoying more quality teen dramas on the WB network. Maybe I can combine the two, and blog about teen dramas on the WB network?

On an entirely unrelated note, I didn't win the fève.

Yesterday at work, we had a "Galette des Rois" party (I work for a French school, so there are a lot of parties). The galette is a sort of puff pastry that the French eat once a year, in celebration of some obscure religious holiday that may or may not have to do with Jerry Lewis. Hidden in the galette is the "fève," a little porcelin thingy, usually just large enough to block the wind pipe. This year it was a tiny cow, which may or may not be significant to the holiday in question. Whoever gets the slice with the lucky charm in it is supposed to have good luck all year long, unless of course they accidentally choke on it and die.

Over the years, I've heard at least 300 different versions of why the French eat the Galette des Rois. It's kind of like daylight savings time - everyone has a different explanation for why it occurs, but none of them make a damn bit of sense. In theory, the Galette des Rois has something to do with Epiphany, but that's another one of those things that nobody can explain. I bet, if cornered, the Pope himself would be stumped if he were on Jeopardy! and the answer to the Daily Double was What is Epiphany? Supposedly it has something to do with the kings that came to see baby Jesus. Now, I'm no biblical scholar, but I always thought the kings were there from the get-go? At least, that's the way it's usually depicted in the manger scenes at the mall, in front of Sears. Does this mean that the three kings got there late? Maybe they had to stop off at Discount Francensense & Myrrh Emporium, but it was a madhouse being Christmas, so they got stuck on the freeway, except they forgot that that excuse wouldn't really work for a few centuries still.

Maybe one of the kings had his kids with him, making it the first-ever Christmas family road trip. Maybe, after being asked, "are we there yet" one time too many, the king turned around to the princes in the back seat. "Do you want me to turn this camel around right now?" It being early on and all, the young princes didn't realize it was an idle threat. "Yes! Please take us home so that we can enjoy whatever it is that we do in this world without video games or TV!"

So, for the first and last time in history, the father actually turned around, and went back home. Little did he know that two thousand some-odd years later, people would not even know that he was the reason they were choking on a little porcelin cow.

Extreeeeeeeme Scrabble

Last night, Paul and I played a game of "Extreme Scrabble" before going to bed (contrary to the rumors, this somewhat dangerous pasttime has nothing to do with how he broke his arm). Extreme Scrabble is just like regular Scrabble, but each player can only take 2 minutes for each turn (that, and it has the word "Extreeeeeeeeme!" in front of it).

Entirely Unrelated Sidenote: Far too many things are coming in Extreeeeeme! versions lately, if you ask me. Ironically, in most cases this appellation only makes sense if you add "sucks in the ..." in front of it. Usually, "Extreeeeeeeme!" simply means that additional food coloring and/or high fructose corn syrup has been gratuitously added to soda, burritos, frisbees, etc. I'm just waiting for the Frisbee Burrito - it's extreeeeeeeme! Throw it!/Eat it!/ Throw it up!!! Your vomit glows in the dark! (Have you ever noticed how TV announcers always speak as if every other word were BOLD ITALICIZED!!!!?) Sadly, the Frisbee Burrito could never happen, because Frisbee is a registered trademark, so they'd have to call it "Extreeeeeme Novelty Flying Disc Burrito!" which just doesn't have the same ring.

Anyway, back to Scrabble. Paul and I have often said, in a tone that imitates joking, that if we were ever to divorce, there's a strong chance that the statement: "quim is NOT a real word!/ YES IT IS!!!" would be cited under "reason for divorce." However, that is not the moral of this particular story.

We were about 15 minutes into the game when Paul threw down "Hoax" on a triple word score with a double letter on the "x," for a total of 66 points. Because we were playing the quick, or, extreeeeeeme! version, so most of my words were a measly 5 or 10 points, so this put him in the lead by about 80 points. Naturally, I felt like "accidentally" turning over the board. Ooops! And then "inadvertently" stomping on it before letting all the letters fly, by "mistake," out of my hands and through the window, little wooden snowflakes of consonants and vowels falling down into the cold hard streets of a bewildered city.

Not that I'm a poor looser.

It seemed, at that point, that I'd might as well quit. So I put down throw-away words, just wanting the whole thing to be over. Then, I got the Q. Then the U. "Queer" in a triple word score! From there, more possibilties started to open up. To make a long story short, because it just occured to me that I'm telling a story about Scrabble --- yes, that's what I'm doing --- I ended up with 249 points at the end of the game, compared to Paul's 237. Yes, children - I won. It was like one of those inspiring movies about an plucky inner city football team that teaches their grizzled white coach an important lesson about why corporal punishment is entirely justifiable.

Anyway, I learned a very important lesson, which was, obviously, that I really am a total dork. And that's ... okay.

Happy New Year and crap! Today, P and I started the New Year off right by watching about 15 hours of network television and eating gratuitously over-fried food ordered from 3 Guys diner (I think they even fried the napkins). The nice thing about New York city is that you can go for days, weeks even, without ever having to put on pants.

Being slightly hung over, or possibly still drunk, or possibly just stupid, it seemed like a good idea to watch Zoolander, which came on TBS for the 10,003rd time this weekend. Zoolander was actually the high point of our cinematic journey today, which ended with King Kong Lives! (orignially, and more appropriately entitled King Kong Blows!).

In King Kong Lives!, we discover that King Kong never actually died when he fell off the Empire State building. Instead, he was taken to Atlanta, to the famous Center for the Advancement of City-Attacking Giant Gorillas(CACAGG), which may or may not be owned by Ted Turner. Apparently, the great ape had developed a heart condition as a result of being shot down by airplanes (although he might have also been taking Vioxx). All the leading minds in the field of City-Attacking Gorilla Cardiology were hard at work trying to develop an artificial heart for the ailing Kong.

The situation looks bleak until hunters stumble upon a female King Kong (Queen Kong?) in Borneo, perhaps running down a beach with her hair in corn rows. She looks just like King Kong, except that she looks even more like a guy in a bad monkey suit. In a very moving turn of events, the two giant gorillas (who look like they should be wearing a sandwich board on 42nd Street, advertizing a Monster Appliance Sale), end up falling in love. Kong is fortunately able to put Ann Darrow behind him, perhaps after going on Dr. Phil to resolve his issues with dating his own species.

The whole story line didn't make much sense, but it did have its moments. My favorite line in the movie - possibly my favorite line in any movie, ever, was when Linda Hamilton (as the sexy giant-gorilla-artificial-heart-transplant-specialist), following Mr. and Mrs. Kong through the woods, opens her sleeping bag to the blond hunter dude, saying (AND I QUOTE), After all, we're primates, too.

That was rad.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, New Year's eve was good. We went to a party at Helen and Fletcher's super-fabulous loft in Greenpoint, guest starring Morgan and Sheri, who moved to Seattle a few months ago. There was a chocolate fountain and ridiculous quantities of champagne and other inebriants, such as deep-fried irish sausages, and several live bands (including Paul's band Live Girls!!!, exclamation points included). Bands with members who aren't afraid to take off their clothes on stage are inherently better than bands where everyone necessarily feels the need to remain dressed. That's my official position on the matter, anyway.