Please submit your crazy irrational tics to my dear friends at My Pet Crazy.

My friend Claire requested I answer this meme:

1. Just how lazy are you?

Very. I have no sense of discipline. I have found a way to quickly and efficiently not walk up a couple of flights of stairs in my local subway station sans elevator.

2. What are you going on and on about these days?

Hmm. I am back on the conjoined twins kick, but I have been talking a lot about my recent visit to the L. Ron Hubbard museum.

3. Your husband/significant someone always calls it a crackpot theory, but you know you’re really onto something. Tell, tell, tell!

Being single means no one criticizes my crackpot theories! HA! My crackpot theory regards the Beach Boys actually being a punk band a la the Ramones. Also I am pretty sure AA is a scary cult, but I don’t think it’s crackpot and a lot of people agree but it’s one of those things you can’t say without people freaking on you.

4. Have you ever eaten a half a hard boiled egg that you found on the floor, and then absentmindedly shaken salt directly into your mouth to chase it?

No, but I have picked something up off the floor I thought was something tasty but was in fact plastic. Oh, the shame.

5. What did you really screw up this year?

Um, hmmm….seeing doctors regularly.

6. What did you really get right?

I think I am getting better at professional networking.  And dating. Go me!

Electric Six is to dancing as Andrew WK is to partying.

Discuss.

I never see anyone famous, mainly because I do not pay attention. I do enjoy the weird tension when a famous person does walk down the street and people pretend to not know who they are. I did see someone famous today so here’s my list of sightings thus far:

• Malcolm Gladwell (outside of the Gourmet Garage. I had previously met him at a book signing, so this was a TOTAL letdown. But the hair was awesome.)
• Kid Rock (in the elevator at work)
• Three Six Mafia (work elevator)
• Marky Ramone (in the audience at CBGB)
• Dustin Diamond (walking out of a Persian restaurant near the Whitney with his hand in a girl’s pants)
• Martin Scorcese (outside of the Pod Hotel, walking with grocery bag)
• Al Sharpton (today, outside of a parking garage/public library across from MOMA)
• Ira Glass (outside of a subway stop on the UWS, talking to a friend about how weird it is when fans recognize him.  I am not going to lie, I had to repress screaming like a Beatles fan)

This would seem to say I should only go to work and art museums.

New Yorker sightings I would love to have:

• Anderson Cooper
• Woody Allen
• An Olsen twin
• Lou Reed
• Chuck Klosterman

though maybe not in the way I would have liked.

me: I swear a lot

friend: men like that.  it means you put out.

Correlation?

The idea that one tragedy means that decades of self-regulation won’t ever work is bullshit.

If you lived in Italy, but grew up in Germany, and you came to New York City, what is the food you’d be LEAST likely to choose to eat?  Probably Italian.  Yet, that’s exactly what the Pope is getting.  Poor Pope.  Get the guy a knish!  Or some Asian fusion!  Some cheesecake!   Who takes a visitor out for their own food?

Also are people really afraid someone’s going to poison the Pope’s food?  What is this 1600?   Does the Pope wield and power whatsoever?  I am still exceedingly perplexed why anyone who isn’t Catholic cares about this.

I like to cook.  I am persnickety about certain cooking tools.  But I have never bought good knives.  Because my knife skills suck.  Suck so hard.  My dad, having spent a life doing foot surgery, cooking, and working in the family grocery, has the best knife skills ever.  He also hates waste, so my poor, poor knife skills attacking a steak he has cooked properly make him weep.

Now, let me use a cracker on some seafood, and I will eviscerate that thing cleanly and efficiently.   But the physics of all knives bewilders me.

Which is why cutting things early this morning has resulted in blood and adrenaline and a bandage that I am scared to look under.  I hoped on the train I wouldn’t spring a leak and be “that bleeding freak who passed out on me.”  Mission accomplished.

While looking for a news story about a cougar found roaming the streets of Chicago, I was suprised to find the high number of websites for “cougar hunting.”  Apparently some people consider women “cougars” when they are only 34!  That seems young to me, though another definition was “anyone more than 7 years your age.”  Frightening.  Go find out where urban cougars hang out in your city here.

I love drastic double meanings in language.  Keeps me amused on the internet, and in business.  Amen!

While my heart is mainly hardened to most proposal stories, this one really got me. I mean a proposal with programming and Bejeweled!? It may be even dorkier than my friends’ proposal being caught by someone else on YouTube (see around 3:20).

*****Edited to add the best pickup line ever, by Simon, “So, you like casual gaming?  How about casual sex?”

I will be in DC the weekend of Apr. 25 around Dupont Circle.  While I have technically been to DC, I found it bewildering in its labyrinthine Orwellianness.  DC makes me want to rock back and forth, autistically.  A town based around people who loooooove rules is frightening for me.  Perhaps I have it all wrong, but if only I could figure out how to get anywhere it would help.  Or if anyone who I asked directions of knew how to get anywhere.  Or if everyone in every bar wasn’t wearing a blue blazer and watching CNN.

This is to say, if you are there, we should have brunch or something.  I am thinking of going to the Smithsonian.  I might actually go look at the mall or white house or something seeing as I spent 5 days there and saw neither last time.

But there will be eating and drinking on the subway.  Because no one tells me I can’t drink somewhere.  NOBODY.  It is my Bob-given right to hydrate, dagnabit.

So last night I watched the film Urban Cowboy.  And I can’t think of a film that I have seen in a long time that is so foreign to my understanding of human interaction.  Firstly, why is an Italian-American playing a hick?  I have no idea.  Secondly, the plot could be summarized as a woman breaking up with an abusive husband for an abusive boyfriend.  The end of the story is the abusive husband beating up the abusive boyfriend for abusing his wife?  I am so confused.  This wins her love back.  Really?

Also, the major disagreement of the entire film is that this woman wants to ride a mechanical bull but her husband will not let her.  I mean he is really angry about her mechanical bull riding.  Has anyone in the history of the world ever broken up a marriage over a mechanical bull disagreement?  How was this movie pitched as real-seeming?  And at first he seems angry about it because it might hurt her, but then he is sort of angry because she is good at it?  Is she supposed to seem like kind of a slut for being good at bull riding?

Also, who puts a punching bag in a bar?  That just seems like a recipe for a fight.   The climax of the film is an indoor rodeo with a dance contest.  Instead of joining a mechanical bullriding contest, why didn’t both of them join the dance contest?  Clearly the film shows they are better at dancing than bullriding and they both agree about it.  Also, how do you score a mechanical bull for rodeo?  I am mystified.  If I were from a rural area, I would feel like this movie was my “The Jazz Singer.”

However, any film with a Dolly Parton lookalike contest is not all bad.

Has anyone else noticed that repackaged inferior technology keeps swelling in technology?  I mean SMS texting is basically what telegraphs were, but we replaced them with phones.  Now that we all have phones, we’re going back to text.  BBSes were what we did before more direct,  private, and temporally concurrent chat technology (instant messaging) was available.  But look at your twitterstream–it’s a party line.  People follow up in broken time and everyone can see it.

Am I taking crazy pills?  Why are we regressing?  Is this tech nostalgia?  Is it retro?

How was I unaware of the NKOTB reunion?  I consider this both a personal failure on my part and on that of my friends for not mentioning it.  HOW COULD YOU?

I have to say, except for the poor facial hair, Danny is far more attractive than he used to be.  Jordan seems like a poor man’s Matthew Broderick now.

Best use of science I have seen lately.  All studies that confirm Bruce Springsteen lyrics are awesome.

Jenn and Lisa have been officially called out for commentary.

At my community bulletin board we were having a discussion of the neighborhood’s gentrification.  Generally the fact that we have a community bulletin board on the internet screams gentrifying to me.  But yesterday as I was shopping, the Indian woman who checked me out at the grocery store complimented me on the color of my skin.  A very nice gesture, but it felt a little colonial.   I am The Man.