Clearly the world has been on pause awaiting my take on the latest media maelstrom involving Star Jones’ departure from The View. Anyone who knows me knows that I am very secretly into The View. And that I very secretly love Star Jones. Which means I’m bereft at the news that another one of my procrasti-friends has left the show, in a hail of bad press at that.

A couple years ago, I fell into this rather unhealthy pattern whereby I became addicted to Ellen, which comes on on NBC at 10am. I would be so buoyed by the non-stop yuks of the Ellen hour, the zany fantasy world of morning chat that permitted me to forget I had a million words to write before the day was out that I risked crashing when Ellen ended at 11. Anyone who has ever had the monkey that is Ellen addiction on her back knows that if one stays tuned to NBC even for five minutes after Ellen ends, one risks falling into the deep abyss that is the horrifyingly depressing reality show about a halfway house full of rock-bottom-residing women who cry and fight and ask god why them called Starting Over. (Ugh, just the title makes me feel like the last person on earth.)

Which is why, like any addict without cable, I had to change the channel swiftly in order to keep my Ellen high as potent as possible, lest I risk crashing and remembering the heaps of work I was avoiding. This, of course, led me straight into the welcoming arms of The View on ABC, where I found solace and PG-13 female-targeted lite entertainment that allowed me to remain safely anesthetized against the cold hard truth of the world, to believe, as I suspect many people who watch daytime television do, that the View hosts were my friends. They saved me, they continued to tie me off and shoot me up with charming repartee and the delusion that since the show was by, for and about women, watching it constituted “research.”

I will not go into my reasons for loving each of the View hostesses in my own way (although I will say that Joy Behar reminds me so much of my mother, I sometimes felt like she was in fact my mother, which made the show that much more like coming home.) Star, for all her shilling and religion-invocation and rapid weight loss that made her face resemble a basset hound’s and love of fur, was hilarious. She was witty and idiosyncratic and wore wigs and used street slang and purred in her buttery contralto. She was, to put it succinctly, all one could ask for and more in a  procrasti-friend. She was the TV equivalent of meeting my  fellow writer friend Stefanie for coffee with our laptops at a cafe where we would ostensibly be working but end up talking the whole time yet somehow manage to avoid feeling guilty because at least we were going down together.

It is my deep desire to be in the studio audience of The View, and on the life version of my Amazon wishlist, I want desperately to be a guest on The View. I also want to be a host. I want to sit at the table with The Ladies and hold my big contoured mug and have impossibly white teeth and participate in  pre-scripted chit-chat on Hot Topics. This wish goes hand-in-hand with my other life plans. Failing either, I’ll settle for a gently used Vornado fan.

If I go to sleep before 11pm, no matter how exhausted I am, I will wake up in the middle of the night. My circadian rhythms are so solid that any sleep before 11 and my body thinks it’s a nap. I must not get into bed at 9:30pm with one of my million books as I did tonight and expect to be awake for more than thirty minutes. I could not keep my eyes open at 10 but boy have I been wide awake since 1:15 (it’s now 3:48am).

Here’s what’s happening:
I’m awake, awake, awake and sing!-awake.

I am starting to feel the aches and soreness of having pumped iron today. I rather like that soreness and am enjoying the fact that I am experiencing its onset instead of waking up tomorrow all creaky and stiff and possibly unable to move my neck.

I am drinking ginger ale and it’s really delightful.

Especially when one got a hankering for salami for dinner and so picked some up at Trader Joe’s and now needs something to settle one’s stomach. Every time I go to the fridge for more ‘ale, I smell the salami in there and rather than being grossed out as I am normally by any smell coming from the fridge, I am reminded that I do love salami very much and despite my stomachache, it is still delicious (if totally gross and marbled and dehydrating and politically depraved).

I did Tuesday’s crossword already and feel at once ahead of the game and a little triste, as I now have no puzzle to do with my coffee. But since I will be rushing around manically in the morning, certain to oversleep since I”m taking a sleep-break in the middle of the night, perhaps this is for the best as there will be no time for dilly-dallying in the morning. I hope there is time for coffee, though. I am excited about Trader Joe’s(’s) Bay Blend. I know this is the house brand that everyone drinks but I have been trying some crazy varieties there, like VOLCANO, which was so strong I was spending every day on the verge of a coronary.

That’s the news from Awakeland. Now to thrash fitfully in clean sheets. (BREAKING: Laundry done this past weekend.)

I am carrying on a profound, manipulative but ultimately deeply satisfying relationship with the New York Public Libary. I am so impressed by the little bookmarklet program that allows me to click a link on my toolbar while looking at a book on Amazon and immediately be taken to the page on the NYPL website to reserve the book that I cannot sleep. I am sly and reserve books before the library has them in stock. I hold off from buying new popular books, sometimes waiting through hundreds of borrowers before me on the library list, so that I can carry the badge of honor of the latest David Sedaris in its Mylar library sheath–a signal to all who “know” that I possess the qualities of restraint, patience and thriftiness necessary to procure these NYPL-equivalents of gold ingots.

I would like it to be known that I do indeed buy books that I love. I just can’t afford to buy all the books I want to read, so I need the library to feed my habit. This is to say that I would prefer that you buy my book and not get it from the library, because I need your cash in order to…buy more books. And pay the electric bill.

Today I returned:
The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club, by Laurie Notaro (over a week late, a buck seventy-five, ooops. This was not supposed to happen since I started using the extremely handy LibraryElf which sends me reminders a few days before books are due.)
Cooking With Fernet Branca, by James Hamilton-Patterson
Garlic and Sapphires, by Ruth Reichl

Why can’t there be a social network for book sharing/rating/discussing like Netflix Friends? I really need this in my life. Please investigate.

I hit the jackpot and now have to do nothing but read for the next two weeks or these choice books I picked up today will have to go back to the ‘brary.

Possible Side Effects, by Augusten Burroughs
Drugs Are Nice, by Lisa Carver
Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell
A Writer’s Life, by Gay Talese
The Last of Her Kind, by Sigrid Nunez

I still have not finished from my last windfall:

The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante
Biographie de la faim, by Amélie Nothomb

How am I supposed to read my newly acquired Edward St. Aubyn imports with all these other books to get through? Will I ever finish Of Human Bondage? Never mind The New Yorker and my recent subscriptive indulgence, Vanity Fair? Will I ever get around to my planned summer reading projects, thorough investigations into The Rosenbergs, the Prague Spring and the peculiar and fascinating fact of New Caledonia?

Did I mention I’m still wrapping stuff up on my own book?

PS Sigrid Nunez cover image because I love the cover. That type treatment makes me swoon. I hope the book is as good as the cover by which I’m judging it. Stay tuned.

Back in the day when I reviewed everything under the sun and moon for Citysearch, I wrote this. I knew I’d sat through a cringe-worthy account of the Beat era before. I anticipate Hettie Jones’ book to be far less irritating.

DATE: May 12, 2003

TITLE: -1 (Minus One)

WRITTEN BY: Gyavira Lasana

DIRECTED BY: David Willinger

THEATER: Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue, New York, NY

A reheated tale of racial tensions in 1950s Greenwich Village.

Talking ‘Bout a Revolution
On the eve of the American Civil Rights Movement, we meet black poet and activist Leo Lepard. Lepard is searching for the lesser of two evils between his white school chums, who consider themselves counter-cultural because they “smoke tea” and date “spades,” and the equally dicey Uncle-Tomming black establishment that would like to use him as their propagandist mouthpiece. Radical, and increasingly violent, racial politics beckon, and Lepard heeds the call.

Play à Clef
Minus One is based on the early career of LeRoi Jones, better known as Amiri Baraka, controversial New Jersey Poet Laureate. Shannon Bryant turns in a fine performance as the beleaguered beatnik, but the script is a stale version late 1950s American history, so oft-portrayed it’s become almost cliché. The sets don’t help matters—Theater for the New City offers a spacious stage, but the space is woefully underused.—Melissa Kirsch

If you’ve been to my apartment in the past six months, you’ve witnessed a terrifying demolition project going on outside my window. Four buildings have been torn down to make way for a luxury hotel that hasn’t been approved by the city but seems to be going up apace. In the midst of the rubble stands one lone building, gutted on the bottom two floors but with tenants on the top two.

In the morning I drink my coffee and watch the women in the windows with their windchimes and orchids and flora drink their own coffee, all of us peering out into the the pit of destruction below.

So, this being NYC, a city where I can see Bob Kerrey at the coffee shop last week followed by unscripted personalities dining al fresco and then just today Nicholas Kristof and his family on the subway to Queens, it turns out that one of the two tenants refusing to be bought out of the crooked little building two feet away is none other than legendary writer and feminist Hettie Jones, former wife of LeRoi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka, aka severely rabble-rousing Beat poet/former poet laureate of New Jersey.

Tonight I accosted her on the sidewalk outside my building and thanked her for resisting the buyout offers (the hotel will have to be built around her building because she’s not giving up the loft where she’s lived forever, evidently a haven for the Beats when she lived there with LeRoi). I told her I was a poet and she asked my name and I did that thing people do when in the presence of people they admire, I said I wasn’t famous like she was and she said “Well, that’s okay! One day you will be!” and I think now why did I take a neighbor-to-neighbor moment and turn it into an idol-worship one, but anyway she was so kind and said “You should read my book, How I Became Hettie Jones, because it tells the story of everyone and everything that went on in that apartment!”

She also said I should wave to her when I see her in the window, probably a little freaked out that I admitted I’ve been watching her across the abyss for a decade.

So I was reading up on her and found this tremendous interview with her and Joyce Johnson who I’ve always adored (Read In the Night Cafe and Minor Characters if you haven’t already.) And now I feel it’s essential that I stop not knowing enough about Hettie Jones. Check it out:

How did your group contribute to the women’s movement at that time?

Jones: By physically taking a stand, rather than
intellectually, or through any particular writing. Simply by saying,
“Okay, I’m going to live on my own. I’m going to acknowledge that I am
a sexual being and I’m going to have sex and I’m going to practice
birth control. I’m going to be a responsible person comparable to a
man-I’m going to live what is generally regarded as a man’s life. I’m
going to have my own apartment and I’m going to have a job and I’m
going to be self-supporting.” Even among the young women I knew who
were slightly younger than I, all this was really considered an
accomplishment. You just weren’t supposed to leave home until you got
married and already lived under another man’s hand...

Also, clothing! Young women today don’t have any
idea of the discomfort. I always talk about this when I make
speeches-that to take off your girdle was a radical move-first came the
girdle and then came the bra-but to take off your girdle! Ah! And be
able to think and walk and move without feeling blistered all the time.
To acknowledge that you could have an ass. And to wear pants!

Now, the 7am construction and imminent loss of light and privacy seem somehow part of something larger Well, maybe I’m trying to put a glossier sheen on a bad jackhammer situation, but maybe this is a wake-up call. Maybe this is the clarion call urging me to stop reading memoirs of coke-addicted art fraudsters and spoiled socialite spawn and actually read something historically relevant and inspiring.

If you have met someone, and a substantial amount of time has passed since you have seen that someone, upon seeing him/her again, do not pretend that you have never met.

Do not avert your eyes, stare straight through them as if you do not recognize them, allow yourself to be reintroduced with no acknowledgment of prior acquaintance, or otherwise assume that introduction time = strangers.

Previously: Blink-and-You’ll-Miss-It Etiquette Lesson on signing emails

Have you ever done a Google search for mifiprex? Mifiprex is a misspelling of “mifeprex,” the tradename for mifepristone in the United States, aka RU-486, aka the abortion pill. Normally, if you enter a misspelled word into Google, especially one that’s just one letter off, you get asked “did you mean mifeprex?” Not so for mifiprex. In fact, I’ve spent the past 45 minutes in a disbelieving haze, thinking that there was just absolutely no information out there about Danco Laboratories’ product. Now I’m in a disbelieving haze that the normally brilliant Google could be so willfully obtuse concerning my search.

Mifeprex Official Site
Googlebomb Watch

Okay, exhale: I have news regarding my eyebrows and the cruelty of the aesthetician previously known as Meany Mc-Hates-Me-Pants who Chickarina readers will remember from a long ago post of approximately a week ago. My darling JB, who started me going to Meany in the first place, recently took her to task for her behavior. What follows is JB’s update of her recent visit and confrontation:

Meany McHates-You-Pants mentioned you to me!! She said, “You know who I’ve seen lately a lot is Melissa!” I said, “Oh yeah, she said you were a little mean to her?” She said:

“Yes I was because I was so angry: she has these beeeeaaauuuuuutiful eyebrows, an arch women would kill for, and she screwed it up–they were butchered!”

She went on and on about how mad she was at the person who butchered your beautiful brows, and I told her she shouldn’t be so harsh because you are sensitive and you took it personally and you are my friend and she said, “Oh it wasn’t like that!”

Believe me, millions of Chickarina readers, so many I can’t count: It was like that.

But thank god for good friends, right?

The NY Times has been ablaze with articles about graduation, commencement speeches, student loan debt, employers doing due diligence on recent grads on MySpace and general advice for the newly mortarboarded. Herein, a round-up because it makes for some good reading. I don’t mind saying that I cover nearly all of this in my book. With far more hilarity.

That said, all of these articles are totally worth checking out, whether you’re a recent grad or not.

Advice to All You Graduates: Let’s Start With That Daily Latte… [6.10.06]

Graduates Get an Earful, From Left, Right and Center [6.11.06]

For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé [6.11.06]

Forgive Us Our Student Debts [6.11.06]

Tonight, through a glass darkly, I spied with my little eye Fran Lebowitz sitting outside at a cafe, drinking Pellegrino and smoking. She was joined by Graydon Carter, who was wearing a plaid blazer and shorts and deck shoes, and then some gangly young guy in a Tom Wolfe suit.

Lately I am thinking about an article I read about Isaac Mizrahi and this excerpt that I pasted into my “Stickies.” (I find it creepy when people refer to Post-It notes as “stickies.” I don’t know why. It’s like the babytalk name for Post-Its.) Anyway. Isaac:

As a child, Mr. Mizrahi said, he dreamed of being a raconteur: the über-dinner guest sprinkling bon mots over red wine and beef Bolognese. “My biggest goal and biggest ambition in life was to be a great conversationalist,” he said. “I care about clothes and design, but more than anything I care about being this unscripted personality.”

This is precisely what I want. I want to be exactly all those things. Fran Lebowitz is the apotheosis of the unscripted personality. This book convinced me I could be a writer. It declared funny and smart were important. If I could be anyone, I’d be a raconteur, an über-dinner guest sprinkling bon mots over red wine and beef Bolognese, every single night of my life. I’d have gout from all that rich food, but I think I’d be good at it.