Blue Monday (& other days that sound like Swedish pop-techno bands)

Happy Blue Monday! Supposedly, today - the third Monday in January - is officially the Most Depressing Day of the Year.

At an awards show last night, Today had these words to say: "First, I'd like to thank George W. Bush ... the weather (shout out to my homey Global Warming!) uh ... the unexplainable popularity of Ashlee Simpson .... that cashmere dog blanket you bought for your cousin on Black Monday, that you now realize will cost an additional 19.8% in interest on your Visa card ... oh, and my wonderful agent ... "

The speech went on and on.

However, the idea that this is the most depressing day isn't what worries me. As citizens, I think we should all be concerned the recent rash of color-coded "anti-holidays" (is that a word? If not, can I officially Coin it? And sell it in a handsome collector's edition from the Marguerite Mint?).

First it was Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when all the retailers go back "in the black." Until this past November, most of us had never heard this aren't-we-clever expression. But then, suddenly, it's everywhere. As if it were a time-honored second-tier holiday, printed on the calendar of every American, but not always observed. Kind of like Boxing Day for the British.

As if Black Friday had been established by the Early Church in an edict from Pope Pius Capitalist IV, as depicted in a stained glass window reproduced on a collectible chalice for Early Burger King (Burgher King?).

That's the scary thing - the marketing gurus have subtly, silently replaced the kings' decrees and papal declarations of old. Instead of making laws that tell you what you can and can't do, they just manipulate you, and let you make your own horrible choices (e.g., Ashlee Simpson). It's infinitely more sinister.

As the story goes, the advertizing exec - I mean, "scientist" (or was that Scientologist?) - who came up with Blue Monday was hired by an online travel site. They noticed that people don't buy a lot of tickets, etc. in mid-to-late January. As a public service, they wanted to encourage people to book vacations to sunny places (as a total coincidence, this is also how they "make money"). So the date for Depressing Day, as it was originally called, was derived through a series of calculations like x=1/the age when you got your first kiss times the square root of the pre-tax fee for "calculating" the most depressing day of the year.

Unfortunately, it backfired. As soon as I heard that this was the most depressing day of the year, it really cheered me up. It took off all the pressure to be not-unhappy. I couldn't stop smiling all day.

Watching T.V. ... On Ice!

For once, I'm really sticking to my New Year's resolutions. It's been three weeks now, and so far, so good with the goal of watching more T.V.

Today, for instance, we watched "Fashion on Ice," coming to you live from the world fashion (and figure skating) capital, Trenton, New Jersey.

Now, I love figure skating fashions (who doesn't?), but the whole concept of Fashion on Ice seemed a little half-baked. Undoubtedly "Top Chef ... On Ice!" was their first choice, but the combination of knives, ovens and ice skates make the NBC legal department a bit nervous.

Sometimes it just seems like the networks are grasping at straws. The thing is, people had to have meetings about this idea. Lots of them. We can imagine the scene--undoubtedly very late at night-- in an executive suite at NBC:

"Okay, so, people love figure skating. And what else do they love? Peanut butter. Why not have a show that combines ..."

Somebody hits a gong, and the unsuspecting exec's chair falls out from under him, as he is thrust into a cavernous pit and ravaged by crocodiles.

The next exec steps up to the plate.

"What were the top-rated Sunday afternoon programs last year?" (cues PowerPoint) "The Figure Skating Championships and (advances PowerPoint to next bullet point) the Westminster Dog Show. So we ran it by some focus groups and came up with (cues PowerPoint again) Westminster ... on Ice! See, figure skaters take the place of the dog trainers, and instead of running around the ring, they ..."

(Splash; sound of crocodiles ripping through human flesh)

By the time someone got around to pitching "Fashion on Ice," the crocodiles were sleeping off the indigestion.

We tuned in halfway through, but I think the concept was that the figure skaters were modeling fashions that were designed especially for them. So that you, at home, can know what's hot in sequined unitards this season.

Poor Chris Issac and his band was out on the ice, performing live, while undoubtedly cursing his agent and/or whatever bookie he owes money to.

In between sets, the announcer - a former male figure-skater (well, still male, but a former skater, anyway) asked, "So, Chris, you've played to audiences all over the world, how does it feel to perform to people doing a triple sow cow and a triple axel to your music?"

It was one of those questions that's not supposed to be ironic and/or insulting, and yet ...

There was an ever-so-brief moment before he opened his mouth to answer; when he was clearly thinking about saying, "Yeah, this experience has taught me that I really need to take cut back on the drug use," or "being here today, Michael, I've become inspired to diversify my investment portfolio so to ensure that my name will never, ever be mentioned in the same sentence as "triple sow cow."

The show also had a lot of weird segues. At one point, the scene cut to one the skaters and her husband, wearing an apron featuring the not-even-subtle product placement of the sponsors, McCormick spices. "After a long day on the ice," the skater says, "I like to come home and eat some pulled pork." (Who doesn't?) Gesturing to her husband, "He's from Birmingham, Alabama, so he loves pulled pork." (NOTE: I don't rembember the exact words, except for "pulled pork." Which I am not making up.) Then he says, "So we use McCormick Pulled Pork seasoning."

They both smile awkwardly at the camera, then at each other. It was pretty uncomfortable for everyone involved.

Keys and White Russians

Tonight, I came home to an empty house.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

No matter how much you love your significant other, there's nothing like having the apartment to oneself for a whole evening. Fortunately, Paul and I seem to agree on this point. Unfortunately, this means I need to get a new hobby/social life/addiction, etc. to get myself out of the house at least one evening a week (the "quid" being the bitch of the "pro quo," I suppose ...).

So there I was, basking in the solitude ... basking.... staring at the wall in between half-assedly working on a crossword puzzle ... In a word: paradise (my standards ain't high, folks).

Then comes a knock on the door. Must be someone from the building, because the buzzer didn't ring. A soft knock, like a hobbit, or a ghost, or some demonic Amway salesman who'll end up eating my kidneys in a bernaise sauce while listening to Rachmoninoff ...

With great trepidation, I open the door. It's my 92-year-old next door neighbor, Mrs. K.
Wordlessly, she points to the deadbolt in my door. Sure enough, my keys are sticking out of it.

"You know, dahlink," she says, with a frighteningly slight hint of a (pre-Revolutionary?) Russian accent, "here in New York, it's not safe to leave your keys in the door ."

She gave me that look that wise old New Yorkers give to wide-eyed young girls straight off the bus from from Kansas, or wherever else it's customary to leave your keys sticking out of the deadbolt of the front door, as a sign of welcome ...

The irony being that Mrs. K is 60 years older than I am. And yet, she lives alone. And doesn't EVER leave her keys in the door.

Unfortunately, it's not the first time I've left my keys in the door/left a suitcase on the stairs in when moving back from Paris/forgotten my purse/gloves/scarves/cats at the grocery store, etc . I've been like this my whole life. Call it A.D.D., call it D.U.M.B. - either way, it's more than a little bit scary. If this is how I am in my early 30s .... If I were a few decades older, they'd have me committed.

Sigh.

Resolutions, cont.

Yesterday, I made some real headway in fulfilling my New Year's Resolutions: I watched every episode of the Top Chef marathon on Bravo, while reading E! online.

That's right --at the same time. After all, one of the secrets of highly effective people is learning to multi-task. I know this because read a LOT of self-help books. And they all stress the importance of setting Primary and Secondary goals that complement one another, thus creating “synergy.” For instance, if you want to be a world-renowned opera singer, you might take voice lessons (Primary Goal), but you would also study Italian (Secondary Goal), for the obvious reason that Italian men are really hot, and if the opera career doesn't work out, at least you’ll have something to fall back on.

So, to go along with watching more T.V., I've also resolved to get less exercise. Not that I don't need the exercise, it's just that I don’t want anything to interfere with my Primary Goal (PG) of watching more T.V. The only Perceived Barrier (PB) to this goal (G) is that, living in Manhattan, we all do an absurd amount of walking. Not "mall walking" or "power walking," like in the suburbs. We call it "getting from one place to another"(GFOPTA).

Most days, for instance, I walk to work. Would that this were a tacit protest of the geo-political ramifications of fossil fuel usage, or time to contemplate goals and intentions for the coming day... But the truth is, walking is just WAY quicker than the crosstown bus, which at rush hour, takes 45 minutes to go a mile and a half. Every block or so, the bus stops to take on 50 people who have to find correct change, or the right metro card, or chatty tourists from Minnesota wanting to know if this is "the bus to Ground Zero," mistaking the M2 bus for one going back in time to 2002.

Almost nobody in the City has a car, so that's not really a solution for reaching my laziness goals in the New Year. At one point, I thought about bringing up my car from Florida. But then it occured to me that having a car in New York would be about as useful as having a pony. It's cute and you can ride it occasionally and stroke its mane, but where do you put it?

That, and you have to wake up early every morning to take care of it. Those of you who live in NYC know that I'm NOT joking, although the City of New York possibly is:

Above is the sign for "No Sweeping." I mean, No Parking. If you see the broom, it means you can't park in the zone. Except when you can.

It’s called Alternate Side Parking. For the purposes of cleaning the streets and for the purposes of “Traffic Flow” (i.e., whatever unbelievably sinister activities this the code word for...) they alternate the sides of the street on which you can legally park. This happens every other day. Except, uh, when it doesn't.

But don't worry - if you need to know what side of the street you can/can’t park on, you can call a hotline, such as Psychic Friends Network, to find out. The schedule for Alternate Side Parking seems to be based on some non-linear algorithm related to the phases of the Mayan, or possibly the Druid calendar. (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that higher-ups of the NYC Department of Transportation secretly practice human sacrifice.)
If you do happen to be parked on the wrong side of the street, your car will be towed, and you'll have to go to one of the outer boroughs to bail it out of car jail. Having a car in New York is like being related to Robert Downey, Jr. - you just never know when you’re going to get that phone call in the middle of the night. Only you can’t make the car go to AA. And A.A.A. won’t help.

Even if you were raised Presbyterian, if you have a car in the city, you can't wait for the festival of Idul-Fitr. Or the second day of Shavuot, or, or the Asian Lunar New Year. This is becase Alternate Side Parking is suspended on a variety of obscure religious holidays, like those Jewish holidays that even your rabbi never heard of (the same rabbi who can't wait for Ramadan, because he won't have to get up and move the station wagon).

What they don't tell you, of course, is that the entire Tri-State Area is a Designated Tow-Away Zone. Once, a friend of mine was moving and I was the sap who to "watch the van." I watched - and pleaded, and argued, and narrowly avoided arrest - as the car got a ticket anyway.

To make matters worse, you'll never see a car parked on the streets in New York that didn't look like it had just gone through some horribly traumatic experience. Whenever I go back home to Florida I'm always struck by how clean the cars all seem. And how all the bumpers are more or less intact.

And if you opt for a parking garage in Manhattan, you're not much better off. First, this can easily set you back $600 a month. And second, they stack your car up, kind of like those compartments for shoes at the bowling alley. No joke. They drive your car onto this jack, kind of like in a Warner Brothers cartoon. And then they raise it up and park another car beneath it, like so:

It's like playing Jenga. So nobody wants to actually get their car out of the lot, because they don't want the whole city to collapse under the weight of 50 late-model Lexuses (Lexii?).

Which kind of defeats the purpose of having a car in the first place.

So you can see my conundrum when it comes to transportation exerting minimal effort. I would get a bike, but that would still involve physical effort. Maybe I'll get a Vespa. Or, better yet, a Segue. That's when you know you're just a lazy fcuk: when you spend $5,000 on something that goes slower than you can walk. But sometimes, you just have to exceed your own expectations...

Resolutions

Today, I got a jump start on my New Year's Resolution: to watch more T.V.

Like a lot of us, I make a long list of "resolutions" at the beginning of each year. Usually, my list includes things like:

1. Write and publish at least one bestselling novel
2. Become fluent in Mandarin Chinese (written & spoken)
3. Learn to figure skate
4. Have a cartoon published in The New Yorker
5. Finish a Sunday Times crossword in less than one hour

As the months go on, ambition gives way to reality, and the goals are adjusted ever-so-slightly, as follows:

1. Finish a Sunday crossword in less than one week.
2. Okay, one year.
3. Okay, ever.
4. Order Kung Pao Shrimp using correct pronunciation.
5. Or at least correct take-out menu number.
6. Watch figure skating on T.V. (assuming Top Model/Top Chef/Pimp My Ride isn’t on at the same time…)
7. Renew subscription to The New Yorker
8. Read at least one bestselling novel.
9. Okay, buy novel and read summary on back cover & pretend to have read it when it comes up at dinner parties.

It finally occurred to me that in the past, my goals have been far too selfish and shallow. This year, I've decided to turn my life over to something ... well, greater than myself.

Yes, I'm talking about celebrity gossip. And watching more cable-network reality shows.
I’m sick of not knowing who-did-what on the latest episode of "Cathouse" (or the short-lived "Catbox," not about prostitutes but actual cats ....). That, and being the last one to hear about celebrity feuds. Imagine my embarrassment recently when two coworkers were talking about the feud between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump, and I had to admit I didn’t know what they were talking about. It was pretty embarrassing. It’s like not knowing there’s a war going on in the Middle East. Although 50% of us don’t seem know that, either, so it would be a bit less of a faux pas.

I’m still not sure what Operation Desert Trump-O’Donnell Storm was over, because it’s impossible to listen to either of them for longer than ten seconds without it triggering a condition known in the medical community as “hysterical retardation.”

Of course, Trump and O'Donnell have been longtime rivals, most notably for the title of World's Most Annoying Human. Let's face it, they've got lots of competition (see: "Miss USA," below), but they nonetheless rise to the top.

Apparently the two disagreed (I don't know who asked, or who cared enough to listen) as to whether or not Miss USA should drink alcohol, or, like all the responsible underage celebrities, just stick to freebasing grade-A Peruvian feline laxatives.

Okay - am I the only one who thought that Miss USA was just the fictional beauty contest in Sandra Bullock movies? Isn’t Miss USA, like, the Mr. Pibb of beauty contests? Miss America is the original - the Dr. Pepper, if you will – of which Miss USA is avoiding-copyright-infringement-by-a-loophole knockoff. Like the Malibu "Marlie" Fashion Doll.

But the point is, I didn’t even know that this conflict was raging, even though it was in all the papers and the nightly news. Yes, the NEWS. On CNN, and NBC and what-not. Along with REAL news, such as who will get custody of the potentially embarrassing sex tapes in Britney Spears’ divorce.

Regardless, this year I'm going to stay connected to what's really important. No insipid celebrity shall go unnoticed, nor any reality show feud uncommented-upon.

At least, a girl can dream ...

Legumes Guarantee a Happy New Year

A slightly belated Happy New Year to all y'all out there.

Personally, I'm very optimistic about the coming year, because I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. For the past 9 years (since I've lived in New York), I've been tempting fate in the most ridiculous of ways. It should have been obvious before now.

No, I'm not talking about boozing, smoking, consorting with men I hardly know, going out partying until 5 a.m., flying Air Tran, or any other devil-may-care activities of the past decade.

Much worse. In recent years, I've neglected to eat Hoppin' John on New Year's Day.

If you were born above the Mason Dixon line, you're probably wondering, "who's Hoppin' John?" You probably just hope he's not the family horse, but perhaps you've seen documentaries about the South (e.g.,"The Dukes of Hazard"). So you know those folks Down There are just "weee-aahd."

When I was growing up, I learned from my grandmother and mother, both South Carolina natives, that if you didn't eat your Hoppin' John and greens on New Year's Day, you'd might as well just call the exterminator and put a fumigation tent over your house. Huh? Yes, a tent. Because you could be certain that a plague of locusts would descend upon you the very next day, and follow you right until the end of the year, along with IRS troubles, hemorrhoids, and - worst of all - unflattering haircuts.

Next time New Year's rolled around, you would know to eat your black-eyed peas and rice, and you would eat them with alacrity. And a side of cornbread.

Until January 1, Paul, who grew up in California, thought that "Blackeyed Peas" was just the name of an over-hyped music group. Poor thing had never had a black-eyed pea in his deprived, West Coast life. And he almost didn't get the chance. I had to go to three different stores here in Manhattan to find a bag of frozen "Blackeye Peas." The canned ones are a bit better, but they don't seem to sell them up here. Is this just a regional thing? Doesn't everyone eat blackeyed peas? Maybe not. Who knew?

There are as many variations on the Hoppin' John recipe as there are families, but the two main ingredients are rice and blackeyed peas. Usually there's some onion, bell pepper, garlic and assorted "natural and artificial flavors." Some people eat it with pork, but in our household, it was mostly just beans and rice. And this would be served with collards or turnip greens every Jan. 1.

"The greens are the dollars, and the peas are the coins," my grandmother would say, "so eat them all up so you'll have lots of money in the New Year."

I know this was probably just a saying someone came up with to get kids to eat their greens, but it seemed like they believed it was an exact science. Whenever the mutual funds or stocks are having a particularly good year, we know in our hearts that it has nothing to do with interest rates or the refinancing of the Yen, or Karl Rove biting the head off of a live chicken (which, apparently, is just for a snack, and not a part of a Satanic ritual ....). We know that the world economy hinges upon what we ate for dinner on New Year's Day.

For the past decade, I've been wondering why my financial situation has sometimes been a bit, ahem, less than robust. All this time, I thought it was because I've been "spending more than I earn" along with "poor financial planning."

To think, all along, it was just about not eating blackeyed peas on New Year's Day ...