Phrases I did not use today

“Mmm-MMM, I’d like to get a bite off a’that muffin top.”

“Looks like a drug deal gone bad, just twenty minutes before we got here.”

“Say, what a great sash.”

“How was the CIA today, honey?”

“It shouldn’t take the worst blizzard in thirty years for you to admit to yourself that you really want to be liked, Quentin!”

“Christ recommends this cheese.  Here, try a piece.”

“No, no — not emphatic, but literate.”

“You’ve been running pell-mell through my telenovela brainstorming sessions all day.”

“I’m going to have to demote you for conduct unbecoming a hemoglobin.”

“Social worker-smocial worker.  She smelled pretty.”

“I hope this isn’t too forward of me, but I painstakingly restored this chafing dish you said you liked.”

“All my life I’ve been looking for these boots and now that I’ve found them, it just sort of feels empty.”

“Hey, what are you guys, a bunch of fake electrons?  You should be excited!”

Only of interest to some

I was in Chicago this weekend and saw, for the first time, a couple shows at the I.O. (née Improv Olympic) Theater in Wrigleyville. This was highly amusing to me because, even though years later I took improv classes in New York, I had never once set foot in the I.O. when I lived right around the corner from it back in 2001-02. When I lived in Chicago, my theater experience of choice was the Neo-Futurists’ show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 plays in 60 minutes), which I saw at least once every few weeks.  The Neo-Futurists opened a New York outpost roughly the same time I got here, first in Park Slope and now in the East Village, putting on a version of Too Much Light in the same building where tons of indie improv teams now perform on weekends.  So it was with great delight that when I went to see the show here in New York a couple months ago, I got pulled on stage to be in one of the plays.  My part was a to-the-death-competitive spelling bee contestant, which I handled with brief aplomb, albeit hopping with laughter during one of the funny bits (as I sometimes do from the backline in improv when a teammate makes a particularly tickling move).  Then, due to legitimate nervousness driving from the pressure of time — an average of about two minutes being allocated to each play — I misspelled a word I’ve typed a thousand times (although I can’t remember what it was now).

This was quite a personal disgrace; if any of you ever commit a crime of moderate violence and, addled with numbing boredom during a stretch of your home confinement sentence, find yourself tracking back through all the missives you have ever received from me, I do believe you will find it very difficult to locate a single spelling error.  I pride myself on being as orthographically accurate as a situation can possibly allow; as a practice, I do not even abbreviate or miscapitalize my text messages.  After the play, one of the New York Neo-Futurists graciously thanked me for participating, although, feeling self-chastened, I dumbly did not reply.  It was still fun to be a part of it, though.

One thing that I did NOT enjoy at my recent visit to the I.O, however, was the fact that there was a piano player (!) who provided supposedly matching musical accompaniment to the improv.  It was horrendous — muddling the actors’ dramatic developments and transitions, and being a generally unnecessary distraction.  We were sitting right next to the pianist, and all throughout the show I had to work diligently to sublimate the urge to yank him off the bench, throw a cup of water on his face and scold him for getting in the way of the funny.      

The way I broke it to my seven-year-old, when he started to take it out of the cupboard and then got upset when I told him he couldn’t.

Look, son.  I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.  This is a mint jelly, and it’s a bit of a refined taste.  Up to this point your only exposure to the genre has been that sugary Smuckers stuff that Mommy spreads on bread for you with peanut butter.   This does not go good with peanut butter.  And don’t even act like you’re just gonna put it on a piece of toast and not end up wasting it because you don’t like the way it tastes.  You can have something else instead.    

No, stop giving me that look, mister–it’s not that I don’t want you to have good things. It’s just that —  I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.  This jelly costs $11.99 for an 8 oz. jar at Whole Foods, and it’s organic.  What you’re looking for is something sweet to put on your English muffin, which is completely valid, given your age.  I mean, you eat cut-up hot dogs in the afternoon, for crissakes; no one expects you to know your Béchamel from your Béarnaise at this point. Just consider yourself lucky.  Youth and innocence slip away, my child, and you spend horridly massive amounts of time mourning their loss once you get older.  I think considering that, you’d do well to just take my advice and treat what’s in that little jar as so much Edenic forbidden fruit. Pick something different.

Oh, stop it! I don’t care what your mother does when you’re with her–this is my weekend!  I already told you that as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.  I bought it specifically because Clarissa is coming over for dinner on Wednesday, and she’s Lebanese, so I’m making lamb.  No, I don’t think that’s a ridiculous assumption.  It’s thoughtful is what it is, unlike a certain backbiting crone who shall remain nameless, and who doesn’t have the simple decency to trade visitation dates when I’ve got something important.  Someday you’ll realize that there are more worthwhile pursuits in life than just getting what you want at any given moment, even if you’re not sure yourself what it is that you want, although it always seems to involve heaping ruin on the person dumb enough to try to make you happy.  My mind is made up, son — go see what’s in the fridge, you can have something from there instead.

What? I was savi- . . . aww, screw it — you can have my milkshake.   

 

Bounce back with bullets

 

• Hipsters shouldn’t use the word “awesome” anymore.  It lost its retro 80s tone at some point over the last five years; I’m not sure when.  We need a new word.  Perhaps I can suggest “Meow-licious?”
• As a matter of fact, hipsters need to stop with the 80s retro nostalgia thing altogether.  The 80s are dead.  They were revived briefly, as a joke, and then, all the sudden, everyone realized wistfully that the 80s were totally Meow-licious in terms of art and style (tell me you didn’t listen to “Let’s Dance” tipsy late at night on the subway home all the time around 2002 — you didn’t?  Well I did) but now, it’s overdone.  When I hear certain 80s songs now, I no longer think about my childhood, but about the time last week, last month or last year I listened to them, the original context wiped away by their more recent witty (or jealous) revival.  And it’s not just music — there are so few original 80s references that haven’t already been mined and rehashed at this point that it seems depressing to even try to come up with anything fresh.  But just to wring it out, here I go: Carl Lewis.  There — the 80s is done, son, so let’s hang them up and move on.     
• The 90s just seem silly to revive, because everything then was so self-aware and ironic that it’s probably just overall too meta to adopt tonge-in-cheek.  The 60s have been done (I seem to remember that being the nostalgia thing back in the 80s), as have the 70s, 50s and even the 40s (remember Bette Midler in “For the Boys”?  ”Memphis Belle”? “Atonement“, for god’s sakes? or that whole swing revival 10 years ago?).  God knows the 20s have been done (one could argue they’re the basis for the 80s?) and the 30s, well, what would you do for that, just have a wild resurgence in the popularity of eating soup that you have to wait on long lines to get?  Doesn’t Hale & Hearty already cover that? [It's late.]  Same deal with the 1910s — unless we figure out a way to integrate huge amounts of soldiers returning from overseas fighting disfigured and dispirited into our current culture, along with a renaissance of muckraking journalism and paranoia and concern that D.W. Griffith movies will cause audiences to have seizures because they’re just too real.  Come to think of it, that might be the way to go.
• Also, this is a picture of me and my brother, taken this past Christmas.  This shows what my head would look like if it were wrapped in plastic because it was some kind of deli meat that you would buy from a store.