Half a Monster

Happy Halloween!

This has always been my favorite holiday, but once again this year, we didn't do anything for Halloween. Last year, we had the excuse that Paul had broken his arm in several places two days before, as reported here. Sometimes it's amazing to think how much can happen in the space of a year.

Tonight, in the spirit of Halloween, we tried that semi-annual experiment of spending an evening without watching TV. It was pretty scary, for reasons that will soon become obvious.

Here's an actual transcript:

PAUL: Wanna play Scrabble?
ME: No.
PAUL: Boggle?
ME: Nah.
PAUL: Commemorative edition "Lord of the Rings" Risk?
(short pause)
ME: As our Halloween costume, can we go as people who are too cool to own something with that particular combination of nouns?
(short pause)
PAUL: Wanna do that thing where you draw the top half of a monster, and I draw the bottom half, and we can't look at each others halves until we're done?

ME pretends to be too cool, before realizing that this is futile.

ME: Okay. Fine. You win. Let's draw a monster.
PAUL: Really?!
ME: It'll pass the time.

ME and PAUL both look at the darkend TV with more than a hint of longing.

PAUL: Wanna call Amy and Brian and ask if they're drawing monsters, too?
ME: Sounds like a cry for help.
PAUL: Yeah, they'd just be jealous.

So we drew a montser (the bottom half was mine, which might be obvious).

Here's our chef d'oeuvre:




I think the two halves reflect male vs. female priorities pretty clearly (note that my half is nicely accessorized, and Paul's ... uh, isn't). We named him/her Diqweena D. Head.

This is a cautionary tale of all couples who might be considering turning off the TV tonight. Just... put down the remote ... slowly, now ...

I haven't updated this blog in a while because I've been super busy at my "day job." By which I mean my job. Which I go to during the day. I like saying "my day job." It implies that there is something infinitely more glamorous, such as acting, or synchronized swimming, or pursuing an exciting career in dental hygeine, that I do on the side.

The other (by which I mean "actual") reason for not blogging/paying bills/showering regularly: I've been watching a lot of T.V. Which is usually what people mean when they say they've been "really busy."

However, the socially acceptable, and at least 57.3% true reason for said busitude is that the evening of October 11, the day when the plane crashed into the building by my work, was supposed to be the date of a fundraising event at work. So, the event had to be cancelled and re-scheduled for the next week, even though I'd spent 2 months planning the first one. Miraculously, it all worked out, although some people were annoyed that we didn't have a "contengency plan" for when an airplane runs into a building down the street.

From now on, it's on the Event Checklist, along with the name of an alternate caterer for when/if ours is ever eaten by Godzilla.

Just the other day, it occured to me that I no longer get that panicked feeling when I hear tons of fire trucks hurling down the street. For the first two years after 2001, like plenty of other New Yorkers, I would turn on CNN every time I heard more than three sirens in the distance, even if most of them were rushing to break down the door of a 5th Ave. apartment where a poodle had set off a motion detector, or maybe to rescue people like me and Paul, who get trapped in their bedroom due to a defective door latch (I promise to tell that story once I've worked it through in therapy, darlings...).

Yesterday at work, our entire block was filled with fire trucks, and what appeared to be every uniformed police officer in the tri-state area. The whole neighborhood smelled like smoke, although nothing like the smell we called, simply, "Trade Center" (everyone in NYC remembers it, in the unrecordable history of scents), a smell you would come across in random patches for a full year after "the events of ..."

I work three blocks from the building that was hit yesterday. "A small plane has hit a building on 72nd Street ..."

I'm sure it was disappointing for the Republicans running for office that it wasn't a terrorist attack. It would have been further proof of Bill Clinton's incompetence.

Still, any phrase with the words "plane" and "hit a building," especially less than 3 blocks away, strikes fear in the hearts of all of us in this city. It didn't seem likely that a terrorist would want to attack a bourgeois apartment high-rise, unless they were from the Pottery Barn Liberation Front. But you never know.

Several of the kids at school saw the whole thing, because the playground is on the roof (if you live in New York, you don't think it's weird to let 5-year-olds experience "the outdoors" on a tar roof). This is something they'll be telling their kids, by which I mean their shrinks, when they're older. By which I mean when they're 5 1/2.

But here's the thing - if this sort of thing can happen as a freak accident (which it is, unless you consider the Yankees a terrorist organization -- and assuming you're not talking about how Gen'rul Sherman marched his horses through your Gram'ama's plantation in Sou' Carolina, thus chipping that soup tureen you see before you, as the story goes in my family) --- what would happen if someone in a small plane harbored malicious intent???

Lucky that terrorists never go to flight school.

That's why it's hard to take the Department of Vaterland Securitat über seriously. They happily let "pleasure craft" - not to mention commercial airlines - fly over the East River, within dirty-bombing distance of Henri Bendel. Henri Bendel.

Is nothing sacred?

Not coincidentally, Henri Bendel is a fine retail outlet for 24/7 Lip Plumper. However, unlike the multi-ton aircraft that fly only a quarter of a mile from easily traumatized Franco-American (not to be confused with Chef Boyardee) children, MY LIP PLUMPER is a danger to this nation. I'm sorry, I still haven't gotten over that one.

(NOTE: when flying this weekend, I noticed that they've relaxed these laws somewhat; you can now take "travel sizes" of prohibited items, because they realized that it would be hard - but perhaps not impossible - to hijack a plane with hair gel.)

But seriously, I have to wonder if the powers-that-be (by which I mean Karl Rove) don't actually want New York to be attacked. It's like we're in some terrible cartoon and the Coyote has sent off for some Acme Bullseye Paint, and we're watching the montage where he strategically spreads it all over the desert, I mean, New York City.

Hopefully, somewhere, there's a falling anvil looming overhead to foil the plot, just in the nick of time.

So, it looks like I'm going to spend my Third Annual 29th birthday - which, for the first time in years will be on a Saturday night - fishing for something called "bigmouth bass." I guess they're sassy.

I haven't been fishing since I was about 10 years old, when I caught an eel and threw it back in the water. Unfortunately, it was still attached to the brand-new fishing pole, which discouraged Dad from ever taking me fishing again (which worked out quite nicely).

I like fish, don't get me wrong, but I like them better in an aquarium, or on a plate in next to a lemon wedge, rather than flopping around next to me on a boat. Personally, I prefer not to know about the size of my dinner's mouth.

For those of you who know Florida, it's somewhere around Welaka, which is kind of near that bastion of world civilization we call Palatka.

Assuming I don't git et by a gater, I'll tell y'all about it once ah git back.

Happy Yom Kippur to all y'all who are celebrating! Actually, since it's the Day of Atonement, I'm not sure if you're supposed to say "Happy ..." But it has a better ring to it than "Somber Yom Kippur!"

I, for one, am having a great Yom Kippur, because I have the day off. Working for the French, we get a lot of French, American, and assorted religious holidays. The only consistent thing about all of these is that none of my coworkers - regardless of their religion or nationality - seems to actually observe any of these occasions. And yet, we have off for Colombus Day and Good Friday and Bastille Day. Not that I'm complaining.

I'm not religious, but I think we should have a national Day of Atonement. Maybe not atonement, per se, but more like an "amnesty day" for calling all the people you've accidentally lost touch with, or to apologize to folks you might have offended/ annoyed/ accidentally barfed in their laundry hampers, etc. This would also go for anyone we might be holding a grudge against, and not just because it really annoys people who hate you when you're nice to them.

The other day, Paul was telling me how every Chinese New Year, he and a friend would call up everyone they'd had any issues with, or friends they'd forgotten to call, or whatever, over the past year. I guess the Chinese have a tradition of making amends at the New Year. (Not that Paul is Chinese, but, hey, if Madonna can wear a yarmukle, then Paul can be General Tso.)

Unfortunately, I have a chronically long list of people to whom I owe phone calls, emails, letters, etc. Instead, I choose to be proactive, by which I mean actively worrying about not calling them, sure that they hate and/or have forgotten me by now. But then, the more time goes by, the more I'm afraid to call because I think they think I don't care about them. It's all very mature.

When faced with any challenge, I turn to the "Personal Growth" aisle at Barnes & Noble. In my self-help book du jour (don't ask ...), I learned that this is from thinking with the "reptilian" parts of the brain. Occasionally my decisions come from the "mammal" or even "primate" parts of the brain, but rarely from the more recently evolved neocortex, or "human" part of the brain.

For all you suckers who belive in "evolution," despite the fact that the President of the United States has assured us that "the jury's still out" on this hocus-pocus, the human brain is composed of many layers, which can explain most of our behaviors. For instance, the "fight or flight" instinct These range from the primordial brain-stem which comes from the age when reptiles came up out of the water, up through the modern parts of the brain that has given us things like art, science, and computers, and back to the primate parts of the brain that primarily use computers to download porn.

I wish I could send an email to all my long-lost friends and say, gee, I'm sorry I never got back to you, but, see, the reptilian section of my brain was avoiding a painful stimulus.

Maybe Hallmark makes a "Shoebox Greetings" card to that effect?