Yeah, so the mystery book that showed up at my door was from my sister and apparently we'd had a recent phone conversation about it. So, I've reached the overtaxed point where discussions with humans now blur with things I've read online in my memory. Maybe this is when middle aged people go to those week-long silent retreats and recharge.
For a spell, I wondered if I had bought the book for myself and had forgotten. I checked my Amazon account and email, but found no evidence. Did I drunk buy it? Probably not; I'm always conscientious about money, even when I'm sloshed.
But what I love even more are angry-sad commenters (most non-New Yorkers, as usual) disgusted with the immoral behavior.
"It’s so nice to know that so many people can AFFORD to be drunk so often as well as shop to their heart’s contents while in such a state."
I'm surprised Obama wasn't invoked. If you can't even afford a $2.99 bottle of Charles Shaw and a used $5 nine-cassette Billy Joel collection on eBay than you're doing life wrong.
I bought a German Vogue at the airport on the way back to NYC to use up my remaining euros. It didn't matter that I couldn't read it (the imported English language magazines cost more than I had) because I can never read (or watch movies or type or sleep--flying is insufferable) while on a plane anyway. I just took a look at it now. One thing I was struck by was that beneath an article about Essie Weingarten (of Essie nail polish fame) where she's shown with gray hair, there was an for a gray-brightening rinse. I don't think I've ever seen an ad for such a product in a US fashion magazine, at least not an upscale one.
Not even in a magazine for older women like More (though nowhere does it explicitly state its demographic; instead you get "More magazine celebrates women of style and substance. We are the leading voice for the woman who lives in a state of constant possibility." Whatever) any which I just took home from the gym to scrutinize. Mariska Hargitay is on the cover (November, not the current issue) with the quote "My life began at 30 and took off at 40." The first ad after you open the flap is for Vanity Fair lingerie, showing a 1968 ad next to the modern one. Both feature three ladies in underwear; two of the women in the contemporary version are plus-sized though no attention is drawn to that fact in the copy. Diane Keaton and Andie McDowell are the models featured in the L'Oreal ads. There are ads for Botox, EstroGel, Lee Jeans that make fun of "mom jeans" and a shitload of Campbell's soup ads throughout the entire thing.
I fess up to liking fashion spreads that don't go crazy with stilettos (eh, there are high heels too), always feature dresses with straps wide enough that you don't have to go braless, nothing cropped, and skirt lengths that wouldn't expose your ass if you bent over. There's a whole spread (this is the abbreviated online version) about longer length skirts, duh. "Graceful lengths that flatter grownups." I think the no miniskirts after 35 rule is total bullshit and anyone who wants to flaunt their legs should wear whatever they please no matter how old; my thighs have just never been my particular best feature so all this grownup skirt business is for me.
So, there's a section on friendship and it features women like Paul Deen, Katie Couric and writers like Sandra Tsing Loh (whom I've always had as soft spot for with her older Gen X ways and I liked her essay because it was about having a friend who bought expensive shoes and would hand them down to her and this was great because they both wore "the same odd size: 9 1/2" Me too!) and um, Sloane Crosley?
In a way, the inclusion in More kind of makes sense because her writing is middle-aged, like a straight lady David Sedaris. I would say she's good at crafting a tidy essay (I tried to read one of her collections to be open minded and dig deep into why she's so loved and I just couldn't get past the third story) and obviously she has vast appeal so she's does everything right. But I find her voice tempered and droll, very much in control despite being whimsical on the surface, sensible like a woman with grown children into a long marriage. I would not be surprised to discover that she was raised by older parents and/or was an oldest child. There aren't a lot of young women with this voice, and maybe that is the appeal.
The style is the opposite of those confessional, damaged, self-destructive, therapy-on-paper type memoirs that often involve sex work and are also popular and that I don't identify with strongly either.
Fictionally speaking, I just found Paula Fox's Desperate Characters in my mailbox and have no recollection of ordering it. After reading the back cover description of the 1970 book, "Otto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. But after Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighborhood cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives." I remembered yes, I read about this on some literary blog (I can't remember which one or find the recent reference) not so long ago and yes, it sounded right up my alley. But I honestly don't remember actually buying it (the receipt was from a Minnesota-based seller on Amazon). No matter, it's a good Christmas present to myself (unless someone read my mind a few weeks ago and sent it to me) since last night I finished non-fiction, Beijing Welcomes You, that was neither look-at-my-charmed-life or look-people-pay-me-for-sex in subject or tone. I tried to learn something from it, but I don't know if I did.
James pays for streaming Netflix even though we probably don’t use it more than once a month because we watch cable and nothing I want on demand is ever on streaming Netflix. To rectify this, he chose a Danish dark comedy/crime movie, Terribly Happy, the other night. Murders take place, a bog where bodies get hidden (and cats are threatened to be thrown into) plays a role, and at some point the big city cop transferred to rural Denmark as punishment vomits. I don’t even remember the context, though it didn’t make Jutland look like a pleasant part of the world to visit.
Speaking of vomiting (in a less cinematic, though no less dismaying fashion) have you ever puked so hard you pissed yourself? I can now firmly say that I have. And it started at my company holiday party where I should’ve been celebrating, enjoying myself since things are not bad at work and I’m doing pretty well for myself lately.
The sweating, incoherence, and nausea came on fast, like those random inexplicable spells I occasionally get when I’m a car passenger to New Jersey. One minute I’m being a typical big mouth, saying too much in front of coworkers, a tendency I just can’t seem to tamp down despite the increasing demands for tight-lipped maturity in my life (this non-private forum is all I have left) next thing I know I’m about to heave my guts up.
I would blame alcohol, but by my standards I hadn’t ingested that much, only three drinks (maybe a poor combination—Manhattan, Chardonnay, champagne, and ultimately a glass of pinot noir, which I couldn’t drink because started literally throwing up in my mouth). I ran to the bathroom only to find a line. I heard a “I like your dress,” which was nice, and after the complimenter went into the bathroom, I puked all over the ground and down the front of my fancy emerald green Kate Spade dress, chunks gathering in the bow framing the collar. I played cool, cleaned up, and had to leave.
I only made it, and barely, two stops on the F train to Dumbo when I had to run onto the platform and heaved so hard that a visible stream of urine trickled leg to toe in my turquoise tights. I couldn’t get back on the next train to go the extra three stops to my neighborhood. Instead, I unwisely decided to walk the two miles home from Dumbo in heels because I was too scared to get back on a subway or hail a cab and I needed the air. Blisters ensued, the shoes were half-destroyed, and I woke up with severe pain in my left hipbone socket because I guess I am aged and can’t walk on tiptoes for 45 minutes straight.
There is no moral to this story other than that I should stick with flats and Old Navy clothing, only drink water, and never leave the house or talk to anyone.
This is a great photo that appears if you Google Image search opkast, though clearly these are Americans not Danes.
Even though I was just in Berlin two Sundays ago (at this moment I’d probably be having a beer in a British chain sports bar attached to a hostel so James could try and catch part of a Redskins game—it’s ok to do stuff like that on your last day of vacation; it was tempered by fondue afterward and a stop at the massive Etsy-fied Holy.Shit.Shopping market beforehand) it already feels hazy, in the distant past.
The whole week was hazy, though, and feverish, a downer even though I had fun too. Maybe I was severely Seasonal Affective Disordered; I felt Portland and zombified. . I’m feeling much more normal now that I’m back in Brooklyn (despite the borough often being anger-and-frustration-inducing, I wouldn’t call it a depressing place). No matter what, I couldn’t get up before noon (or fall asleep before 4am) and by the time I was up and out of the hotel, freezing, rain-soaked, the daylight was already fading and gone by 4pm. Maybe it was too much Nazi and East/West history, exhausting and introspection-inducing. The overheated hotel (we kept turning off the heat and it would come back on sweat-making as ever) led to restless sleep, earaches, scratchy throats (that was probably the rampant cigarette smoking by myself and everyone else, though) and wacked-out dreams (though not scary ones—I woke up convinced that my sister was genuinely dating Gabe from The Office, though he was just a person and not Gabe from The Office) so that I’d wake up tired and panicked. I’ve never felt so convinced of a chemical imbalance, like something in my rational brain broke in Berlin. The heights while winding up the spiral Reichstag ramp threw me so off balance I had to turn around one-third of the way up and was scared the whole rail-clutching way back down. Wobbly, I just stuck to the open outdoor space, watching the city expand from each four sides of the building. I began tearing up, not because it was particularly moving or meaningful. Maybe I shouldn’t have seen Melancholia.
I always dread coming home after a vacation; I hate the last night and put off going to bed as long as possible (much like a regular Sunday night, though this drama has been reduced now that I can work from home most Mondays and most of the week if I feel like it). I was trying to squeeze in five good hours of sleep before we had to be up and out to catch a 10am flight. The movie James was watching in the living room wasn’t helping, something Spanish-language about hunting humans that threw me off even muffled with the door shut. It sounded distressing even though I couldn’t make out words.
My brain raced despite efforts to calm and go zen. Maybe I should learn mediation? A woman I once knew with the last name L’Orange (I won’t use her full name, but if you Google it, she doesn’t come up at all, just hits for a coffee liqueur-based drink of the same name) popped into my head. Why, then, why at all? She briefly managed the movie theater attached to the museum and art school my freshman year. She was a recent grad, tall, short-haired, makeup-less, bespectacled, and plainer than her name suggested (I expected someone exotic or at least French). She painted horses, in an artsy serious way opposed to the other woman who worked in the box office who did horse screen prints. She probably wasn’t more than 25, though she seemed like a grown-up; I liked being around art students in their later 20s because they seemed more stable and you didn’t have to impress them. I answered an ad for a part-time work study job selling tickets and ushering. It seemed more fun than working in the library, the work study job I was already doing. It was easy. We’d smoke at the counter, hang out, watch the movies, and occasionally this woman would buy Chinese food from the hole in the wall next to the Safeway across the street using skimmed funds (the next manager kept up this tradition and I would occasionally partake, just enough for a pack of cigarettes or a few after-work drinks—you make different types of decisions when you’re a young adult earning $4.75/hour, ten hours per week). In particular, though, I was thinking about a Thanksgiving I spent at her house, with her boyfriend who she fought with (I don’t remember why, possibly because he was slacky and underachieving though they were both stoners) and a few others (even when I lived in the same city, I didn’t feel strongly about family holidays, particularly in the early ‘90s). I can’t recall a single detail about the event, just sitting on a futon, there being two floors to the apartment around Morrison St. and 12th Ave., and being asked to bring a can of pumpkin puree, which doesn’t make sense because wouldn’t you have wanted to have pies already baked before guests arrived?
Then I bolted awake, more awake, sweating, realizing that Thanksgiving was more or less 20 years ago. Another lifetime nearly; I’m hardly like the 20-year-old me at all. I have a tendency to remember ancient events as if they were just the other day, and that’s kind of dangerous and false. On the surface, that right now 60 is the same distance as 20 is unfathomable. Rationally, that’s a long ways off and I will be totally different then too. As far as medians go, ok, I guess I am nearly middle-aged and it’s not offensive or upsetting it’s just the middle of being younger and older. Instead of half-dead (though I would hope to live past 60) it also means doubly smart. Forty-year-olds are so much more together than 20-year-olds; the trick is being able to harness the benefits of self-awareness before tumbling down the other side. At that moment, I thought I had an epiphany and would return to NYC with renewed vigor after a German week in a cold, dark place.
Now I’m not so sure. Theoretically, I don’t have a problem with being middle-aged—I just like being melodramatic—the anxiety stems from a shift from thinking of all the things you can do and are still ahead of you to thinking of all the things you haven’t done and probably never will. And I don’t even mean being an astronaut or president, or a princess (or getting married, having children, or owning a home, which aren’t my goals either).
Somewhere in my 20s I realized I was better with words than images, but I’m not magazine or other big name publication good (though I would argue connections have more to do with anything than skills, and being anti-social doesn’t get anyone anywhere). I now write for a living and am finally in a solid financial position (this took 20 years! Not so for others) but I didn’t imagine I would be writing about digital marketing. I did not move from Portland to NYC to write about e-commerce, and yet I do. I wouldn’t go so far as saying this is a disappointment; it’s the result of a security-driven path, knowing there’s no fallback or cushion and now being too old and with higher expectations to be poor and living piecemeal from low-paying, fun topics freelance work or just being flat-out lucky and/or driven and/or talented with the charisma to win the fun topics/good pay/prestige trifecta.
In the latest issue of Bon Appetit, writer Adam Sachs throws a party for 55 friends where he turns 20 ducks into prosciutto and rillettes (among other dishes) for his 40th birthday. I’m not sure that I have five friends who would show up, my last birthday wasn’t even celebrated, but moreover what path did you take that you end up with a fabulous party that you document in your Bon Appetit column (you’ve also been a GQ staff writer and literally traveled around the world for Conde Nast Traveler have been sent to eat a $750 lunch in Berlin with your girlfriend) Not a passive one. Someone raised with high expectations.
Ok, Adam Sachs is a completely random example. I don’t want to be him or someone like him or a female version, I just happened to be reading Bon Appetit and wondered how one becomes this type of person. Someone who hasn’t had to buy shampoo in over a decade? Technically, I do know. You get a food gig at a smaller publication like Time Out or Village Voice in your 20s (I mean for someone who is 40 now—with so many pro food blogs and sites, the current pool of late 20s/early 30s food writers is much more vast and they can’t possibly all win increasingly rare prestige, mostly print, jobs when they are ten years older) and make a name for yourself and meet the right people. Enough about that.
So, I can’t tell—is Young Adult a good or annoying movie? I’ll probably see it anyway.
Of the 20 million things that annoy me on a daily basis (I just discovered that the sound of a spoon rapidly scraping the remaining bits of yogurt from a plastic container makes me violent—hmm…no, not true; I’ve been repressing my first encounter with this sound that surfaced in 2004 when a coworker ate flax oatmeal daily from a reusable plastic dish. For the record, I like both of these offenders as people, but that sound is excruciating) I’ve discovered that “vocal fry” is not one of them.
It took me forever to even find an audio example where I could detect the linguistic tic and once I understood what it was, it didn’t bother me in the least. I barely even notice the creaky voice or that it's taken over the younger female population. (I'm still stuck on how pubic hair waxing so rapidly became the norm. Also, the other story I read this week on the topic--only a writer in her 20s, who I happen to like, would call pubic hair "70s bush" when the shift didn't happen until the '90s. This is not ancient history.) I’m definitely of the up-talking Valley Girl persuasion, an affliction I’m aware of and consciously trying to rid myself of now that I conduct a lot of interviews with marketers and brands at work and want to come across as authoritative. (I now have a sore throat from trying to speak with vocal fry last night and meowing to the cats using that lower register to see if they liked it.)
While trying to get to the bottom of what vocal fry sounds like, I came across this article about Northwest dialects (you can go on all day about there being no such thing as accentlessness, but I remain unconvinced that anyone in Oregon or Washington speaks differently than what’s commonly accepted as neutral, i.e. TV speaking). I’m still completely WTF over one of the comments:
“I have long understood that the voice of the Northwest was the voice of Goofy, the Walt Disney character. Pinto Colvig, the creator of Goofy's voice, was once asked where he got the accent, and he said he was just speaking the way people did in his hometown of Gresham, Ore.”
The only late 20th century Gresham weirdness, which isn’t that weird, was calling hazelnuts filberts, and crayfish crawdads (weirder because no one associates those Gulf Coast crustaceans with the NW) and not wanting to catch them down at the creek (not crick, I don’t think) with other kids.
I did eat a berliner, one regular and one miniaturized and double Michelin-starred. But this is not about food.
Berlin is Not Brooklyn. I hear Berlin/Brooklyn comparisons, though with the exception of Berlin’s size and more cosmopolitan nature, the city was much more of a Portland to me. (There is a shared love of taxidermy, however—I don’t think I’ve seen so many antlers, employed by ironically and earnestly in one week.) Unemployment is high, rents aren’t, no one seems to have real jobs, bikers, a gazillion of them, are accommodated, and there is a suspicious lack of black people. Also, it was damp, gray, rainy and depressing to the point where I couldn’t get up before noon every day and couldn’t fall asleep before 4am, which in reality is a healthy eight hours of sleep, but with the sun going down by 4pm, I had a very short window of barely there daylight. They were even selling S.A.D. light boxes at KaDeWe, the city’s major department store.
Smoking. Despite what I thought was a smoking ban in 2008, Berlin is the only foreign city I’ve been to in the past few years where smoking is still occurring in bars (not in restaurants, however). Even Spain, land of hardcore smokers, they step outside for a puff now. I didn’t encounter a single bar, divey or upscale, where smoking wasn’t allowed. Some had dedicated rooms, some did not. People smoke in subway stations, parents smoke with small children (I would love to measure the wrath I’d incur from pushing a stroller around Carroll Gardens while smoking a cigarette) um, and supposedly, “swallowing cigarette butts is one of the top causes of poisoning in children in Berlin.”
Drinking. One of my sister’s examples of why Berlin was so great on her visit a few years back was that she’d seen people riding bikes while drinking beers. I, myself, have never seen so much public beer drinking. Bikes is the least of it. When you buy a beer at a doner stand or a convenience store you are asked if you want it opened or not. There is nothing weird about walking down the sidewalk drinking a beer, usually Berliner Kindl, nor on the subway. I encountered men in suit jackets drinking a beer on the subway during the middle of the day while at night nearly everyone on the subway was drinking beers, many quite young. Beer and wine is legal at 16, hard liquor reserved till 18. I remember being offered alcohol and cigarettes by adults when I was in France for a month the summer between junior and senior years of high school, and it felt weird.
Seeing Double. ampm is a convenience store chain I grew up with in Oregon. am to pm is the name of a 24-hour bar/café housed in the S-Bahn station that was a block from my hotel. The logos are strikingly similar.
Heeled. I like heels, at least the way they look. Many Decembers I’ve declared that wearing heels will be something I attempt more in the coming new year. It never happens. I like flats and wedges and heels no higher than 2”. (I looked at thousands of booties, what a horrible word, but better than shootie, before going on vacation and couldn’t find a single pair that met my criteria. I ended up buying these [which oddly, so did an online sort-of-frenemy the same week] and returning them after briefly walking around because I can’t have leather or fabric on the heel, even a tiny heel, because it scuffs and shreds upon first wearing). It was boot weather in Berlin and there was not a stiletto or monster platform in sight. 98% of women, young and old, wore practical shoes. I’ve never seen so many females in a world capital in flats that still seemed stylish (on my one trip to D.C. I also noticed a weird absence of heels, but everyone seemed frumpy). I don’t know if this is because they are fast walkers—Berlin is the only place I’ve ever been that’s on par with NYC for aggressive/speedy walking, and I love that—because of all of the cobblestones, because they're naturally taller, or if it’s just German nature to be sensible. I’ll probably vow to wear more heels in 2012, but I know that I will stick to flats and baby wedges.
Big & Tall. My suspicions were confirmed after an H&M stop (Sweden has H&M, Spain has Zara, Japan Uniqlo, UK Top Shop—I don’t think Germany has a homegrown equivalent) and I noticed they were fully stocked in the complete range of sizes up to a US 16 (here, you rarely find much over a 10) and also had a (not that great) plus size section. German women get much taller than American women, particularly New York women who are on average much shorter than Oregonians (who are all Anglo, Germanic, Nordic stock, I guess). While many were medium-height, there were an usual number of women in the 5’10” range and above range. I felt like a midget while shopping at Rossmann, a drug store, and I’m 5’8”. During a Frankfurt layover to Singapore in 2003, I deduced that it must be easier to find extended calf boots (they’re now far more common in the US than eight years ago) because so many women were tall and large (not fat). I still don’t understand why H&M dropped their plus-size line in the US when it still exists in Europe (I also saw it in Madrid) and we’re the fat ones. There were also plenty of tourist-sized females in Berlin who were definitely locals. Berlin is not Paris. I’m also curious now about the Netherlands after reading that their H&M and Zara sizing is larger than the US and the rest of Europe.
Socialism. The DDR Museum was lighthearted compared to the Topography of Terror (I love that name) which likely had to do with the fun, borderline kitsch interactive displays that gave statistics and history lessons about life in East Berlin. Growing up, stories of border-crossing attempts put my stomach in knots the same way that the threat of nuclear attacks (accidental leaks were more scary), illustrations of sea creatures, particularly whales and plesiosaurs, and photos of Thai dancers in Disney encyclopedias made me uneasy. I remember being nervous, watching a dated movie in a children’s church class about a family trying to escape in a hot air balloon (I never read the Anne Frank book; my introduction to Nazi-era horribleness was through Corrie ten Boom, which we heard a lot about in church—that Christian angle, I guess—or maybe not a lot at all, but she’s the figure that’s stuck in my mind. We must’ve had her books around the house.) Surely, living in East Berlin sucked, though the interactive exhibits at the museum made some aspects see almost fun. I got to touch and feel DDR jeans compared to the coveted Levi’s and see the plastic Trabi, a car families may have had to wait 16 years to obtain. I could also see some of the appeal of socialism, especially given how lopsided incomes are here. Everyone got educations, women earned money, childcare was subsidized, as well as housing. Nudist resorts were popular, to my surprise, inexpensive vacations were given (only to acceptable countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, of course) and weirdly to me, there was a state-owned cruise ship everyone could use for their allotted time off. Fun times. At least you could go to college, get a job, guaranteed housing, childcare, and weirdo trips. Never mind that things we take for granted like bananas, lemons, and garlic were difficult to obtain (yes, it would be the food that ultimately got to me—I bought a cookbook in the gift shop, but I can’t exactly read German).
In-Flight. Air Berlin also gave me a taste of what living in the starved-for-contemporary-entertainment DDR must’ve been like. I was subjected to Cheers and Friends reruns and Four Wedding and a Funeral on the communal TVs (I guess I’m spoiled from Jet Blue and long haul Asia flights where you get your own screen to control). And while the Russell Branded Arthur is relatively fresh, it still made me want to scream.
The Stasi. I also wondered what I was in for after getting into a verbal altercation with the young man across the aisle from me before we’d even taken off. The plane was 90% German going (and returning, weirdly) and I was quickly introduced to a nosy, rule-following nature (which kind of doesn’t jibe with the rampant smoking and public drinking). While waiting to be cleared for takeoff, he poked me and said, “Your phone is still on.” Now, thinking back, I realize that he probably meant to be helpful. But the accent/tone threw me off and I was initially genuinely confused. My phone was zipped into the inner pocket of my purse on the ground. How did he know whether my phone was turned off or on? I asked, “How do you know?” and then it turned into a confrontation and he got extremely angry. (In some ways, this reminded me of when a teen many years ago tried mugging me and was yelling “Give me your wallet!” and I tried clarifying, “Do you want my wallet or the money?” because I was going to Asia for the first time [the aforementioned trip with the Frankfurt layover] the following week and was freaking out about my credit cards and driver’s license while the $12 wasn’t the end of the world, if I had to give it to this kid, and it totally enraged him, though he did end up running off.) I assume he knew whether my phone had been turned off properly or not (it hadn’t for the record, but that wasn’t his concern) because he had been staring at everything I had been doing instead of minding his own business. New Yorkers do not say something if we see something. Telling on people for infractions that affect no one can get you punched. Who are you, the Stasi? We don’t spy and tattle on their neighbors, jeez. Finally, when we landed, and got to embark (no matter how early we buy tickets, we end up in the back of the plane) a plastic wrapper from who knows what fell from my seat onto the ground and the young (emphasizing this because it’s not chiding old people I encountered) man who had been sitting behind me said, “You dropped something.” Ok, minor and possibly being helpful again, but like dude, MYOB! I could’ve been spitting on the ground, clipping my nails, or throwing down gnawed chicken bones in NYC and gross, yes, but call a stranger out at your peril.
I’m not sure which is more Portland: chastising someone ran over by a cab (driven by a female—very un-NYC) while sleeping in their motel room for still being in bed at 11am (my family all gets up at like 5am for shits and giggles) or that the original comment was removed. Aren’t most news comment sections like 85% offensive anyway?
"I write as candidly as possible about my decades-long struggle with mental illness, about sex and relationships, and about the difficulties of being a middle-aged poet with a lousy publication record. It’s really not a very interesting blog, in my opinion."
--Neither overtly mentally ill or a poet, I have worried about over-blogging and work. It has gotten me into trouble over the years and now I rarely write about anything deeply personal. Not sure if it's just part of the aging/maturing process or if I'm on guard.
For the love of god, please make me stop watching Secretly Pregnant. Something about these do-nothing holidays always drags me into a marathon of a previously unknown-to-me cable show. I forced myself to turn off the second episode in a row of Mall Cops: Mall of America, but not before they arrested a Russian man who stole a bottle of wine from a liquor store (they have liquor stores in malls in Minnesota?) sat down at restaurant and drank the whole thing, then got belligerent and while being arrested kept telling the cops he was going to poop, using the word poop and then totally shit his pants, prompting the narration, “It really had become black Friday for the officer charged with cleaning up this customer.”
Back to unexpected babies, where I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant is humorous (literally pooping babies into toilets? C’mon) Secretly Pregnant is depressing because if a woman is scared to death to tell friends or family she’s pregnant (and the ages range from 20-42 in the four episodes I’ve seen so it’s not a problem only for the young and inexperienced) then it’s probably because she has a horrible relationship with either them and in every case the woman can’t afford a child, many already have one or two, are either fighting with the husband/boyfriend or have already broken up with him. Most have crappy jobs or no job and are living with a parent or grandparent or in a motel. Why on earth are they having (more) children? It’s almost enough to make me want to watch Say Yes to the Dress: Big Bliss, a less serious breed of depressing.
Anyway, I meant to briefly talk about Melanie Lynskie. Ok, I didn’t know that was her name either, I always forget it. She randomly shows up on TV shows and movies like the not-that-great Helena From the Wedding on IFC the other night that I stayed up watching well past my self-imposed 1am weeknight bedtime. I always think she’s someone else and that she’s chubby even though she completely is not (she had an underwear scene in that movie and was very much a toned medium-sized woman) and I can’t help but think how she must feel about Kate Winslet’s career path (who I never ever think looks chubby despite tabloids calling her fat). I always associate Lynskie with Heavenly Creatures when neither actress was well-known.
I guess being a regular on Two and a Half Men, as a stalker, no less, would be considered plum by many actors who get the occasional gig on Law & Order or The Mentalist, and she does have five 2011 IMDB listings.
Who is Melanie Lynskie? She follows Kurt Loder, Cinnamon Snail, the Hoboken vegan food truck, Asia Argento, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Morrissey, and Oprah, among 377 others. Twitter is rich profiling tool.
