In the world’s beat-up road sign
I saw new
History of time!
New history of time!

“Wonderlust King.” I’ve been nuts about this song, I make no secret of it. I love the video, I love the song, I love Eugene, I love it all. It’s good for a rainy day (today). Or a sunny day (never, according to my Mac OS X Meteorologist program).

I’m bringing back the Sunday Matinee feature this week. I don’t know why I stopped. Oh yes I do. I felt compelled to find video/images to present and they weren’t necessarily good or worth your/my time. Our time. Our quality time together. We call it QT. Also, blogging on Sunday is sometimes difficult, because I’m too busy watching Kathy Griffin reruns. Or scheming to go for a long run just before it starts to thunder and I am thwarted and must stay inside and watch Kathy Griffin.

Heck, in the interest of reviving yet another recently-slumbering Chickarina feature, let’s take a poll.

“A recent Yahoo study indicates that the days in which emoticons were considered as unacceptably casual as flip-flops at work are over.”

From the NYT. Let me be clear here. Flip-flops are still not acceptable in an office. They are even less acceptable now that they are either all jangly-jangly trussed up with rhinestones, or as slappity-slap-slap loud as Havaianas. Beach shoes. Shower shoes. Leave them in Negril.

Just because Havaianas are the “cool” brand of rubber flip-flops now does not make them haute couture or acceptable at work. It also does not make it acceptable for them to cost over $10.

Furthermore, those flip-flops with the inner contour footbed situation are not acceptable either. They’re probably more comfortable than your basic rubber flop, but they are still too devil-may-care for the workplace. Unless the workplace is the pool at the Y.

Confidential to Lisa Belkin: Why wasn’t I interviewed for this article?

[T]his is the first time in history that four generations — those who lived through World War II, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y — are together in the workplace.

Managers tell stories of summer associates who come to meetings with midriffs exposed, baring a belly ring; of interns who walk through the halls engaged with iPods; of new hires who explain they need Fridays off because their boyfriends get Fridays off and they have a share in a beach house. Then there is the tale of the summer hire who sent a text message to a senior partner asking “Are bras required as part of the dress code?”

I’m all over that shit, yo. Just kidding. Kind of.

Which brings me to emoticons. It’s possible I’m coming around. I have long lamented the lack of tone on email, mostly because no one gets my deadpan humor and I’m terrified of insulting people. I don’t know if I could bring myself to “wink” at you after I make some comment, but I do appreciate people smiling to let me know they still like me after they send me something I might construe as mean and/or disappointing.

I have been watching a lot of Kathy Griffin. Who was ROBBED of her rightful seat on The View, PS. (I haven’t dignified yesterday’s announcement of Whoopi and Sherri Who-the-Hell-Are-You-Again-Besides-A-Little-Conservative? as Rosie’s “replacement” because I am now giving The View one year. Those two people are not interesting to me. Nor are they funny. Or provcocative. Or good-looking.)

Anyway, Kathy. I think she’s funny. I saw her on my Larry King Video Podcast (Yes, this is what it has come down to) and found her hilarious. So, inspired by KG, my new excuse for anything I say that is or is not funny is “That’s something I’m working on for my act.” I have decided to have a fictional “act” that I’m working on, as if I were a stand-up comedian. This is not unlike One Woman’s Opinion, the fictional book of everything I think. It is fun to say “Oh, sorry I hurt your feelings, that’s just a bit I’m working on for my act.” Or when someone laughs, “Oh good, I’m thinking about using that in my act.” Or if something falls flat, “I guess I’m going to have to refine that bit before I put it in my act.”

The foundation of my act is a one-liner I came up with at dinner with Leigh & Stefanie the other night. It’s a little dirty and I don’t think I can repeat it here. I think it’s a stellar bit, really a very good joke, but too racy for this family website. Because I don’t want my six-year-old fans, or my sizeable senior citizen readership reading a joke about roofies. Email me if you want to hear it.

Oh dear god that emoticon looks LiveJournal-idiotic up there. It hurts me to leave it. Like I am getting acid stomach just looking at it. I won’t look at it.

PS I have been posting more frequently to my Tumblr blog recently. It’s good for quick inspirations. Also I find myself curiously drawn to Facebook. Who am I to spurn LiveJournal. I’ll be blogging there soon, just watch me. Next stop, Webkins.

If this isn’t the best thing that ever happened to you, I’d like to hear what is.

Last night I went to the alternately fascinating and maddening Community Board meeting for the entire Lower East Side of Manhattan. On the docket, among 6000 other items, was The Situation. You know. The intolerable, brain-rattling severe badtime outside the window.

Argh. So the demolition/construction nightmare that nervily calls itself the Cooper Square Hotel was applying for a liquor license. Which, it would appear, the community opposes. Which was made manifest by the large group of concerned citizens that sat for ten years in an unairconditioned room (the room where we vote, actually, which was a bit of a thrill for me, I must admit, but it wore off pretty quick) awaiting the appearance of the hotel developer (young! inarticulate! mumbling! unprepared! L.A.?) and his straight-out-of-central-casting, not-fast-enough-talking, oily lawyer and their frighteningly young PR flack.

It wasn’t the deliberations about whether or not the hotel will get its liquor license (the one that would permit it to serve liquor, play music and endorse revelry on a terrace precisely 101 inches from my window, according to an irate neighbor) that interested me (I think they’ll get the license; what kind of deal they’ll strike with the neighbors seems to be the real question), but rather the sort of small-town feeling a Community Board meeting in NYC has, the Waiting for Guffman-esque quality of local government, and also the fact that, for six sweaty hours, I got a taste of what it might be like to live in a small town. Which, I have to admit, I sort of loved.

People stood up and argued passionately for their causes. The Board was full of articulate, stalwart Protectors of the Last Bit of Sanity Left in the neighborhood. I had no idea that every single restaurant serving liquor, wine or beer had to stand before this panel of had-it-up-to-here elected (?) officials, the majority of whom seemed to know the location of every bar in the area, its noise violation history, its owners, etc.

The Board was also by turns arbitrary (strange punishments were inflicted on the fly as “stipulations” by which a bar could obtain/reinstate its license — this person was clearly at the same meeting I was, but the DBGB liquor license proposal came up after midnight, after I’d unfortunately had to surrender and go to sleep); condescending (more than once, anyone who dared disagree or endorse a liquor license was treated to an elder’s finger-wagging: “Let me give you a piece of Bowery history…”); and ohdeargod intimidating.

This last, is, I think, a byproduct of crowds. The Crowd has got to be one of the scariest, most terrifying mechanisms of intimidation on earth. The Crowd is going to eat you for lunch with hollandaise. I found myself magically transformed from a quietly angry-at-the-noise neighbor to a wolf, a wolf in a giant pack of wolves, ready to pounce on and tear limb from limb one quavering Matthew Moss, hotel developer to the stars (One of my favorite moments of the night came when a woman on my block raised her hand and told Moss that if he dared call his hotel “upscale” one more time in our presence, we’d quite possibly brain him for this insult). I had been sitting in the back for hours, but when the developers got up, I stood up. I joined in the chuckling and clucking and muttering under my breath with the crowd, all of us united in our crusade to Take Down the Man.

I clapped when 45-year residents of East 7th Street gave impassioned soliloquies about the decline of the neighborhood. I became insta-emotional when a resident of the senior citizens home across the street asked if there would be taxis idling outside her window for hotel patrons because she was worried about the “diesel fumes” and the ability of ambulettes to get by. I chucked garbage at the three people who dared stand up and speak on behalf of the hotel (well, I did smirk and boo a little and maybe agree that these crowd-defiers had to be hired shills for the hotel, their rationale that this hotel would finally make the neighborhood “safe” and give their parents a place to stay when they come to town did seem ridiculous compared to the fact that I’m overpaying to live in a shoebox in the middle of what’s becoming some east coast proxy for Las Vegas.)

Needless to say, the Board gave the Cooper Square Hotel boys a sound beating, replete with screaming and gnashing of teeth. As I said, I couldn’t stay until the bitter end, but there was something about it that felt very small; it felt like a community, gathered to make decisions for the benefit of the community. It also felt surreally futile: Community Board 3 has got to be the most put-upon CB in the city, containing as it does both the East Village and the Lower East Side, which cancel out the Meatpacking District in sheer number of bars and history, history, history. As if there was any way anyone, any “board” was going to shut down the wheels and cogs of “progress” (a word invoked by one hotel crusader, only to be screamed down by the angry mob), or, realistically, the machine that is NYC nightlife and the obscene amounts of money that fuels it.

Some highlights of my time as an extra in Waiting for Cooper (the Cooper Square Hotel didn’t come up on the agenda until 11pm — the meeting started at 6:30):

Several people nearly had nervous breakdowns in pleading their cases about why people should/should not get licensed. I liked how the Board would get in a shouting match with a proprietor, then someone would make a motion to deny the license, and it would seem logical not necessarily because the license wasn’t deserved, but because in the course of the altercation, things would escalate so quickly that the bar owners would immediately seem to be crazy and out of control and obviously not deserving of walking the streets after dusk, much less a cabaret license.

Today I went to see Meany McHatesMePants on the LES, wandered around down there and listened to the new Gogol Bordello (transcendent) and picked up my organic vegetables from the CSA, stopping in various community gardens along the way. I’m reinhabiting my neighborhood, perhaps. I’m getting reacquainted and feeling a little more okay about things. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to, as a recent email from Seattle Liz exhorted: “i have an idea…MOVE TO SEATTLE AND WE’LL START A BOOK GROUP,” but it’s something.

 
Love the blog? Buy the book.

I’m trying out Tumblr, a quick-blog round-up of stuff — links, photos, quotes, inspirations. It seems very genius, very Web 2.0 at its zenith, but who knows?

Anyway, I’ve been finding it more fun to post to my Tumblr blog than any of my zillion others these days. Inspirations, kind of like a Schott’s Miscellany but web-based. Try it out — it’s pretty addictive. Like blogging with training wheels, or advanced blogging, or blogging add-on, or more ways to waste time and collect ephemera and never finish that novel.

PS I’m not writing a novel. But you know what I mean.

Would you believe me if I told you it was some of the weirdest and best and also most hilarious ice cream I’ve ever had? Pop rocks in your ice cream! That is fun ice cream! Maybe not for every day, but once a year, come on: impossible not to be thrilled by.

I’m back in the hottest city ever after a long stay upstate, where I not only went to a rainy Fourth of July cookout in a log cabin in a town improbably named “Andes,” I also wandered several sleepy towns along the Hudson Valley, had several iced coffees and smelled nature, which you notice when you get out of New York, you notice the smell of the trees. I slept. I decided to give up on The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe and read American Sucker by David Denby instead. I saw an opossum (not a possum) up close. Very cute if you can get over the looooong rat tail.

Meanwhile, in the blogosphere.

1. Scooter Libby, commuted sentence, what the hell
2. Age of Love, that barfy bachelor show that pits “cougars” against “kittens”

3. The crap flying into my apartment through the air conditioner
4. The maternity tunic with no pants look that everyone seems to be wearing
5. People inside open-air restaurants looking haughtily, superiorly, out
6. Scooter Libby! Commuted sentence! What the hell?!?
7. “Scooter”

I cannot make this an even 10 because most things do not render me speechless. I’m fairly speechful. If any more speechful, I might be given to bursts of spontaneous oratory. Oration. Oratory? Oration? Orating.

I was just telling Leigh I talk too much. It’s true, I probably say some useless things. But so much of what I have to say is really good. Like sometimes quotable good.

I’m just being bashful. It’s all quotable.

I like when people quote me back to myself and I’ve forgotten I had said something clever once so I get to be impressed with myself.

Where is this going? Wherefore this sudden burst of hubris?
It’s late. In the morning I’ll be self-effacing and racked with doubt again.

This has been an impromptu list followed by a totally unqualified burst of self-congratulatory blather, brought to you by Fatigue and Too Much Time Rendered Speechless So the Dams Were Bursting.