Romantic comedies are bullshit

Romantic comedies make real life dating seem like a total drag.  The guy I'm dating has never organized his impossibly adorable pre-school class to perform a choreographed song and dance routine at my place of employment, but I'm still supposed to think that he likes me?  We've been seeing each other for over two months and I haven't been flown to Hong Kong yet.  What a dick.  Why do I even return his calls?

People in romantic comedies are always going into barren baseball parks at night, somehow have the keys, somehow know how to turn on the lights, somehow never get caught.

People in romantic comedies always go to extreme measures to woo persons they met only once.  In real life, if a woman were to make an extreme romantic gesture, she would be immediately dubbed “psycho” and avoided at all costs.

In real life, I would punch a guy in the face if he started singing to me under any circumstances whatsoever.

People in romantic comedies have an alarming tolerance for cheesy first dates.  No one really wants to go on a picnic (I don't know you, so, yes, let us drive out to a field in the middle of nowhere.  But first, let me put in a call to Unsolved Mysteries and save everyone the middle man on the search for my hacked up corpse).

In real life, there will be no second date after a "wacky" family dinner involving physical comedy.

People in romantic comedies often live in very small towns filled with friendly, educated people with nice teeth who all get along and bake pies and volunteer in the drama department of the local grade school.  There is often a hoedown (are there really such things as town hoedowns in 2010?  In the 90s even?) where everyone actually knows how to "hoe down", everyone unashamedly goes, and everyone falls in love.

People in romantic comedies are always being cheered on in their romance by large crowds of strangers, say, in a coffee shop, a classroom full of kindergarteners, a bus, everyone at the DMV.

Many times, the people in romantic comedies are presented to us as persons with flaws. For instance, the main character may be a fat girl, and this fat girl is often played by Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock, you know, just painfully fat, hard to look at even. Or perhaps the main character is a nerd, you know, Chris Klein or Ryan Reynolds, both of them just woefully nerdy.

Angry slap-fighting in romantic comedies inevitably makes everyone very horny. I poked my boyfriend in the chest once.  It led to him taking the key to my apartment off of his keychain and throwing it at me, not to us having passionate sex in an elevator.

Women crying in romantic comedies are always beautiful and the guy is always brushing her lovely hair out of her pretty face.  Go take a gander at yourself the next time you cry, my friend.  Witness snot.

Lovers in romantic comedies often find themselves running towards each other Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy-style.

No one ever really gets on (or off) the plane at the last second.  Most people just take their flights as scheduled, and regret it the whole way.  I tried to get off of a plane once for a guy, but they wouldn't let me because my bags had been checked.  Fucking terrorists.

People in romantic movies are always primarily supported and loved by the stranger they met on the bus just prior to learning that they have inoperable cancer.  I'm pretty sure the presence of a pimple or an allergic sneeze would cause me to not get asked out.

Awful plastic surgery -- Strawberry Shortcake

My sister-in-law Lauren sent me these photos of Strawberry Shortcake:

Original

Acceptable

WTF?

They've turned Strawberry Shortcake into a Playboy Playmate.  She may as well have her top off and be straddling a Vespa in the last picture.  And what is this?

This 2-inch doll has more hair than I do.  And why does she have a Michael Jackson nose?  Who felt like that was a good idea?

I LOVED Strawberry Shortcake as a child.  I still use my Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag regularly.  I had ALL of the dolls, except, of course, the boy dolls.  For the same reason that I was not allowed to have a Ken doll, I was not allowed to have Huckleberry Pie or the Purple Pie Man.  I don't even want to know what Huck looks like now.  His name is probably "Huckleberry 'the Situation' Pie."

The whole point of Strawberry Shortcake was that she was not a Barbie Doll.... she lived in a strawberry for the love of christ.  Her hat looked like a window treatment and her dress was a mass of giant doilies.  Why does updating her mean she has to look like a hooker?  Lauren and I object.

Non-smokers

I would really like to open this one by posting a dozen pictures of my non-smoker friends smoking my cigarettes.  I won't do that, of course, because to do so would be to out them as casual smokers/moochers, and there's no need.  They know who they are.  These are the people who ask me to remove from Facebook really pretty pictures of myself because they can be seen in the background puffing on a Parliament.

What's going on with Parliaments?  When I started smoking, everyone smoked Marlboros and Camels.  When did all the cool people start smoking Parliaments?  I don't care.  I'm not switching.  I smoke Marlboro Light 100s which are 5,000 yards long.  I need a

Nifty Nabber to light them and I'm not ashamed of that at all.  They last longer than regular cigarettes.  And they make me look ridiculous, which is of no concern to me.  Not when I'm getting cigarette savings.

I have been a smoker for a long time.  I started at 16 for the same reason that kids in after-school specials smoke: I had a friend who tried.  Also, it was the only thing I could do and get away with that was "bad" because I didn't have the balls to get bad grades or drink, and I needed to defy my parents in some fashion.

My mother loves to tell people the story of how she found out about my smoking.  First of all, let's just get out of the way that I was really a piece of crap as a teenager.  I was smoking in my bedroom.  I wasn't fooling anyone and I wasn't even trying.  Although I was sticking my head out my window, my window was right above the kitchen window.  My mom was making dinner and she smelled smoke coming down from upstairs.  She came banging on my door.  I opened the door and she said, "Are you smoking in here?"  I looked her straight in the eyes and said, "Yeah."  Then I slammed the door in her face and turned up "Guns in the Sky," ("Well, I'm sick of it.  It's a load of shit!")  I was SO DRAMATIC.

Then my mom grounded me for like, the rest of high school, which is why I never went anywhere when I was in high school.  I snuck out to smoke and write and give blowjobs in cars, which is the way it seems to be with parenting: if you try to control your kids, you will just make everything worse.  What my mother should have done was sit me down at the kitchen table and force me to smoke pack after pack of Marlboro reds (that's what I smoked back then) until I puked.  Then I'm sure I would have never smoked again.  But as is was, she drove me to suck dicks.  It's the same old tale.

I've never even considered quitting smoking, even though, as all sentient human beings know by now

For this reason, I am obviously NOT a proponent of smoking.  It is a filthy, disgusting habit, but it is addictive for many reasons, and I like to do it when I do certain things, like, for example: I like to smoke when I drive, when I drink, when I write, when I lay out by the pool, before and after running, after sex, and generally any time when I am putting my mind to some sort of "use."  For years I said that I would quit when I had a baby, but no baby = no quitting.  And anyway, if I have no progeny, who really cares how long I live?  May as well tap out early in that case.

Part of the problem with smoking is that it is legal.  If you could get an 8 ball of coke at the 7-11, I would totally do coke every day of the week.  But, as it is, you can only get liquor and cigarettes and Slurpees at the 7-11, so I have a very real alcohol/cigarette/Slurpee problem.  I'm sure there are people who DO have access to coke as if it can be found in a 7-11, and to those people, I say, I'm sorry for bumming all that coke from you.  You must feel about me the way I feel about the people who are always bumming cigarettes from me and acting as if they don't know how to go about getting their own damn cigarettes.  With all the sin tax piled on, a pack of shitty cigarettes costs $10 in Chicago. That's why I buy the super long ones.

Rather than worry about quitting, I've recently decided to class up my smoking.  I'm going to start smoking expensive cigarettes -- no matter that I will no longer have money for food.  I'm also going to carry my cigarettes in a classy silver cigarette case engraved with the words "FUMARISTA LOCA" in cursive and use a comically long cigarette holder. 

Also, I will always wear a really fancy hat from now on when I smoke.

I feel the need to do this because I say, take pride!!  Drinkers are allowed to drink in style.  Why not smokers?  Smokers are the most pathetic, marginalized, hated group of citizens in America today.  Have you ever seen the outsides of buildings in Chicago in the dead of winter -- all smoking floors have been abolished, so they're out there in the freezing cold, with no mittens, having foregone their 15 minute lunch breaks to huddle in doorways while trying to eke out a few drags before taking a 10 minute elevator ride back to the 56th floor.

You used to be able to smoke in bars, but not anymore.  I am always trying to get away with things.  My friends are annoyed by this, but I will smoke just about anywhere until someone comes up to me and tells me to stop.  I will act like I am from Europe and had NO IDEA that I wasn't allowed to smoke in the ladies room at Wrigley Field.  I don't care if I get caught.  At that point, I've gotten when I needed.  If I have to put my cigarette out, so what?  I was actually told I couldn't smoke on an outdoor sidewalk while a truck was driving by spewing black smoke.  The server and I both actually coughed while we were having the exchange where she was telling me that I couldn't smoke in the street, and this truck is going by infecting my lungs and the rest of the sidewalk a thousand times more than I could do if I smoked one million cigarettes at this sidewalk part of the restaurant.

I know smoking is gross.  But you know what else is gross?  Gaucho pants.  THOSE should be illegal in bars.

The Brownie Pants

After a long day of cleaning and doing laundry and grocery shopping and paying the bills and getting the oil changed and ironing the 15 button down shirts of her husband and two parochial school children, my mother would have to drive us to Lombard or Fucking Wilmette to battle it out for an hour-long “basketball” or “volleyball” game with the children of St. Mary’s or St. Joseph’s, or some other Catholic grade school that HAD a gymnasium to practice in. We weren’t so blessed and had to practice at the gyms of real (public) schools. I don’t recall anyone ever teaching us any rules or skills to these games. The ball would just show up in your hands and you would start running and jumping wild as a Whirling Dervish, and sometimes things would happen that were considered lucky, and you would get points, and other times, you would foul out. This happened to me. Whereas I do recall being better than mediocre at volleyball, but mostly because I was insane with energy and they gave you knee pads, which made you invincible, I don’t recall anyone ever teaching me any rules about basketball. It isn't true, of course, that we didn’t have coaches. Very dedicated, kind, and exceedingly patient fathers or older sisters or brothers would coach our teams, but I was too busy goofing around to pay attention, and for some reason, this wasn’t corrected, because I was the muscle of the team. I would foul out of every single basketball game, usually near the end of the third quarter, and this was never discouraged. I suspect it may have actually been strategic, to put the giant girl out on the court to pick off the other team’s most talented ball handlers. Some cute little thing would come towards me dribbling, and I’d stick out my arm and clothes-line her in her throat because no one ever told me that this was not the goal of basketball.

I didn’t care about the rules. It never occurred to me to ask. I fouled out of every game and spent a quarter sitting on the bench, so the most important thing to me about the basketball games was my hair. I would put it up in tremendous curly pigtails and adorn it with giant bows and then spend a minimum of four hours trying to “do” my bangs. This took resolve and courage and was achieved with a curling iron and hot rollers and bobby pins and barrettes and eight cans of Aqua Net, and they never “turned out” anyway. The girls’ sports teams were much about the hair. We looked like gymnasts from Czechoslovakia (that country existed back then) flailing around the court.

The one thing that was OK about being the tallest girl in my class was that I got picked first for all manner of PE activities, the most exciting of which were capture the flag and dodge ball, capture the flag because there were only three boys in my class who could run faster than me, and dodge ball because of my lightening fast reflexes and Hulk-like strength. I was 5’7” as a 12 year old, and being tall is the most shameful thing you can be when you are a young girl. The only thing that would have been more shameful would have been if I had been 9 feet tall with actual reproductive organs coming out of my forehead.

I didn’t know my own strength, and again, we were encouraged to try to win, so I would bean the smallest girls right in the face and specifically aim for the nuts of the boys, again, because no one ever told me not to. It occurs to me now that the PE teachers let me behave this way probably because it was hilarious. It was a Catholic grade school without a gym, so for all I know the PE teachers were volunteers, or worse, being paid some insulting salary of $300 a year to babysit us for an hour 3x a week.

So anyway, after school, and after I did my homework and spent the whole late afternoon doing my hair, my mother would drive around town picking up my classmates, and then she’d have to sit and watch this agonizing spectacle for an hour and then drive us back to Naperville and drop everyone off at home and then come home and cook us dinner. And because my father was a consultant, he left home every Sunday night and didn’t come home till Friday, so she was doing this all by herself. When I would go into emotional hysterics about the tragedy of my unfortunate hair or my embarrassing great height, it’s no wonder that she would tell me to shut up. She had tuna casserole to bake and 7 more shirts to iron and then after all of that, had to help me study the explorers for a Social Studies quiz. And I’m sure my little brother had some needs of his own. And than her husband would call every night from wherever he was, a Marriott in Seattle or Albuquerque or Philadelphia, and he would say, “How did it go?” and I’m sure she wanted to reach through the phone and strangle him for leaving her alone with us all week. It seems like a miserable fucking existence, but she did this for me, and she was then the same age that I am now. Last week I wouldn’t even flip over my apparently-dead next door neighbor lying in her own vomit in my hallway just to see whether or not she was still breathing, so I hardly think I would be any good at parenting a pre-teen and encouraging her myriad extracurricular activities.

I had a lot of activities. I played the piano and the clarinet, and was not particularly talented at either. I loved gymnastics and ballet until I grew out of my leotard and looked so comically gigantic next to the other girls, that I finally had to bow out with no grace whatsoever. I think I fell off a balance beam and was lying in a pool of my own blood and the teachers were just like, she’s too big to pick up. Let her bleed out.

The one thing that my mom wanted me to do that I didn’t want to do was join the damn Brownies. When I was in second grade, even the largest Brownie pants to be found in all of Ohio did not fit me. My mother, who fancied herself to be somewhat of a seamstress, set out to make me a pair of pants that I could wear to Brownies; however, these pants that she made were not the official shade of Brownie brown -- that beautiful smooth brown of Atlantic City boardwalk fudge.

No, these pants were a sort of oatmeal color. I cried every Tuesday afternoon as I changed into my ridiculous impostor Brownie pants, and finally, my mother let me to stop going to Brownies. For the short time I was in the Brownies, I learned two things: (1) how to attach macaroni to things, and (2) how to apply a tourniquet. I'm sure they meant to teach us more about first aid, but they didn't. Just, if someone's bleeding  take off your belt and cut off the circulation until the limb falls off. To this day, that's the only thing I know about helping people. You stubbed your toe? I'm taking off my belt. Your boyfriend dumped you? Here comes a tourniquet! So, come to think of it, Marcie should be counting her blessings that I didn't get around to practicing any first aid on her last week when she was lying in a lump down the hall.

If I ever meet a Brownie-pants-maker, I will glue some macaroni to that culprit's face, and apply a bunch of tourniquets, and bean him in the nuts with a dodge ball.

100 People

In the early days of the Internet, when there were some people with email addresses and some hold outs, it used to be fairly common for most of your email to come in the form of the "forward."  By now, if you are fortunate, this has mostly died out.  You'll get the occasional LOL cat,
 

but for the most part, everyone who's anyone knows better than to forward you a chain letter prescribing a bleak demise if you don't send it to 10 people.  For now, only your great aunt who just got her first AOL account is sending you shit like the following, which is something that came around circa 2001:

---
THE WHOLE WORLD AS 100 PEOPLE

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look like this:

There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere (north and south)
8 Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male

70 would be non-white
30 white

70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual
11 homosexual

59% of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people and all 6 would be citizens of the United States.

80 would live in substandard housing

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition -- 1 would be near death, 1 would be near birth

1 would have a college education

1 would own a computer

Suddenly feeling fortunate?

Me too.
---

2001 was a long time ago, so I did some checking around.  Here's an update:

Out of 100 people, there would be:

99 Asians
1 vaguely "brown" person named Alan

51 would be female
48 would be male
1 would be RuPaul

70 would be non-white
30 would have a great tan

70 would not be able to board an airplane without arousing suspicion
30 would be in-expertly trying to jam over-sized roller bags into the overhead compartment while mumbling under their breath about the "ferners" on the flight

89 would be able to get legally married
11 would be really snappy dressers

59% of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of Dick Cheney, who, as I understand it, is the only citizen of the United States able to come and go as he pleases, commit treason at his leisure, not show up for depositions, embezzle, start wars, perjure himself, and shoot people in the face.

80 would live in Louisiana

70 would not be able to identify Louisiana on a map of Louisiana

50 would suffer from malnutrition -- 49 would be sitting in a McDonalds, the other one would be sitting behind Sally Struthers in a Unicef commercial

1 would have a Homer Simpson soundbox on his iPhone

100 would be able to re-create the Thriller video from start to finish

1 (probably Alan) would eat kittens for lunch

The view from your window

Email me a picture of the view from your window right now.  Include your first name, as well as the time and the city and state where the picture was taken.

Email Jules

The view from Jules' window

[Chicago, Illinois at 1:23 a.m.]

The view from where Erin's window would be if the

asshole partners at her law firm didn't make her

work in a soul-crushing, highlighter-infested closet

with walls painted the color "Suicide Dull"

[Minneapolis, Minnesota at 8:10 a.m.]

The view from Inger's back window

We wish to note that Inger is a partner at Erin's law

firm, and though Windy loves this whimsical backyard,

we hate her for what she is doing to Erin. Incidentally,

Inger, go to work!  Erin has been there for an hour already! 

[Eagan, Minnesota at 9:13 a.m.]

The view from Gara's window

Gara, you look a little land-locked

[Chicago, Illinois at 10:05 a.m.]

The view from Jenny's window

where she is working and not at that movie theater

eating popcorn and watching that dumb Twilight movie

[Atlanta, Georgia at 11:15 a.m.]

The view from Rich's window

same building as Jenny, other side of the office

Rich appears to be less imprisoned by micro blinds

[Atlanta, Georgia at 11:30 a.m.]

The view from Jake's window

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at 11:30 a.m.]

The view from Todd's window

[Ithaca, New York at 4:42 p.m.]

The view from Anna's window

[Hammond, Indiana at 12:32 p.m.]

[anonymous]

The view from Mandy's window

[High Point, North Carolina at 7:47 p.m.]

The view from Arif's window

[Chicago, Illinois at sunset]

Elizabeth's "window"

Fake it if you have to.

Many thanks to all of you!  I so enjoyed getting your emails and pictures today :)

[This idea for this post came from Andrew Sullivan's brilliant blog]

In review

Movie Review: "The Blind Side", or, I'd rather watch "Titanic" again

I will tell you what I think of "The Blind Side."  Why not review "E.T." or "Terms of Endearment", you ask?  Yes yes, I know.  I'm a little late to the party with this one, but I knew I wasn't going to like it so I waited for it to come out on DVD, which it did very recently.  This is a stupid movie for a host of reasons, but I'll focus on just one: What if Big Mike had turned out to NOT be a football superstar?  What if he had continued to get shit grades and have a face full of snaggled up teeth and had continued to move around in the world with the speed of an inanimate object and have the personality of a doorknob?  What if he had been more like, say, Precious?  This movie bugs mostly because it makes it seem like the family who adopts him is doing him this huge favor, but they end up not even having to pay for him to go to college.  They feed him a steady diet of Taco Bell, and they don't even fix his teeth.  No braces.  No college tuition.  Free chalupa diet.  And a built-in body guard for their dork-ass son.

Say, I feel like adopting.  I wonder if Brian Urlacher needs a new home.  Brian Urlacher, do you want to sleep on my sofa?  That's about the equivalent level of altruism, don't you think?

This reminds me of something I saw on the dumb Today show, which I hate for lots of reasons.  The reason I hated it most recently was that they did a story on this woman who had a loving husband, six children, a dozen grandchildren, a big beautiful house, and a horse.  She also had some type of terminal cancer and her family helped her fight it and they were raising awareness, which is not the part I'm knocking.  The part I'm knocking is she had a loving husband, six children, a dozen grandchildren, a big beautiful house, and a horse.  Can someone please tell me what is sad about that?  She also had health insurance and she was getting the best treatment someone else's money could buy.  Her doctors at the Mayo Clinic liked her so much, they were going out of their way to fight for her to get experimental treatments, and the treatments appeared to be effective.  They didn't say this, but I bet she had a fancy car, and probably the circus lives in her back yard, and Keebler elves live in her trees and put fresh-baked cookies on her windowsills every morning.  The dumb Today show built it up like this woman was so unfortunate, but from what I could tell, she had a pretty awesome fucking life.  Also, she was OLD.  She'd seen her six healthy, successful children get married and have their own children.

The dumb Today show got it all wrong.  Here's the story the dumb Today show SHOULD have done: somewhere on Lower Wacker, there is a homeless Viet Nam veteran with prostate cancer, only he hasn't been diagnosed because he hasn't been to the doctor since they turned him away from the VA hospital the last time he went.  They told him his PTSD wasn't real, his symptoms were untreatable, and treatment for his psychiatric problems wasn't covered by insurance.  I wanna see the show about the guy who has nothing, no family, no one to love or take care of him, including his government, and show what it's like for that guy to have cancer.

Whoops!  Got a little angry there for a minute... let's cheer up and talk about a movie that I watched right after I watched "The Blind Side": "Titanic"

Again, I realize that I'm not exactly coming out in front of this one.  I’m 13 years tardy with this movie review, but "Titanic" was on TBS tonight.  It’s so watchable, even though it is long.  And really dumb.  Even though I don’t like it, I’ve seen it a number of times.  When it first came out in 1997, I had no desire to see it.  It had been so obnoxiously hyped as the most expensive movie ever made.  Also, there’s the problem of the Celine Dion love ballad.  I was boycotting it for that reason alone.  The other reason was, I knew the ending.  I knew the ending because everything I know about the Titanic comes from a song my mom taught me when I was little and it is one of my favorite songs:

When they built the ship Titanic

To sail the ocean blue

They said it was a ship

That the water would never go through

It was on its maiden trip

When the iceberg hit the ship

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It was sad

It was sad

It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the sea

[here’s the tactful part I made up to go in harmony with the chorus]

(husbands and wives, little children lost their lives)

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It was off the English shore

‘bout a thousand miles or more

When the rich refused

to associate with the with the poor

so they put ‘em down below

where they’d be the first to go

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It was sad

It was sad

It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the sea

[and again with the good taste]

(uncles and aunts, little children lost their pants)

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

So the moral of my story

As you can plainly see

Is to wear a life preserver

And never go out to sea

For the Lord’s almighty hands

Knew the ship would never land

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It was sad

It was sad

It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the sea

It was sad when the great ship went down down down

It

Was

Oh

So

Sad

Blub blub blub blub blub

You have to do the "blub blub blub blub blub" part at the end to make it clear that you have no compassion for drowning victims.

So, I had no intention of seeing this movie.  However, I was home for Christmas break and my dad and my brother went to see it without me and my mom, because my mom and I were convinced that we had our song.  We didn’t need a movie too.  But all through Christmas dinner, my dad and my brother were talking about how great "Titanic" was.  Mike was saying how amazing the editing was, and he is an editor, so I started to wonder if I was missing out.  When I got back to school, my boyfriend’s family had worn him down about it as well, so we went to see "Titanic."  We were both skeptical.  My boyfriend’s mother had for some reason given him the Titanic soundtrack for Christmas, and he kept playing "My Heart Will Go On" in his apartment, and my roommate, who was a dude (and not even gay!), kept singing it around our house.  The song was everywhere.  In my yoga class.  At the mall.  I wanted to smack everyone.

Besides the horrific soundtrack, there were two other things that bugged about this movie.  First off, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet don’t match up so great.  I don’t think that Kate Winslet (then or now) is overweight, but Leo was pretty young and scrawny at that time, and I recall a movie reviewer saying that watching them make out in an old-timey car in the basement of the boat was like watching a Chihuahua mount a Great Dane.  While I felt this was unjust to Kate, I agree that all the making out in the movie is somewhat awkward.  Besides, on principle, I hate love stories.  They give everyone on planet earth the wrong idea about the way things are supposed to happen when you're in love.  Unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment.  And, very often, sex in hot tubs.

Second, the villain in the movie was so badly portrayed that he may as well have had a glint in his evil smile (with a sound effect) and been stroking a black cat in every scene.  He tries to get on the first life boat with the women and children.  No one could be that evil, not even an evil person, not even in a movie, and not even in my actual life, in which some men have behaved abysmally.

I love how they make it look like the poor people in the basement are having so much fun at their dancing and drinking parties every night. My family came over in steerage on boats like that around the same time and all they ever said was that it rained all the time, there were rats, everyone was always seasick and green and had typhus, and if you had any babies with you, they died.  I lost four aunts and uncles to these boats.  No one was dancing and singing.  They were having back-up children.

All of the acting in this picture is supremely bad. The only good acting is Kathy Bates as the lovable Molly Brown, who looks out for Jack by lending him her son's tuxedo and being some kind of feminist because she rides on boats alone. Molly Brown is the only one who wants to go back for the survivors.  The other acting that is good is done by the men in the string quartet who continue to play as the ship goes down. This is the part of the picture that will make you start to weep, and when I think of dying at its finest, there should always be a string quartet.

I don’t mind that the movie is long, or that Bill Paxton is wearing a giant hoop earring, or that they keep showing extreme close ups of the old lady’s eyes even though her glaucoma is repulsive.  I don’t mind that James Cameron is some kind of legendary dick in the industry, or that children in Burundi are crying even today over the amount of potable water that was wasted in the making of the film.  I don’t care that no one, NO ONE, likes the ending, in which the old lady sneakily drops the 96-karat Heart of the Ocean off the ship and seems pleased about it, the haggedy old hag.  She really shouldn’t have done that.  Do you think her grandkids enjoyed that ending?  Do you think they might have been a bit ruffled when they saw how things actually went down.  “Hey, Grandma, do you think I might have liked to, say, go to college, or have a Vespa?”

But I don’t even care that that old lady was an asshole.  What I really don’t like about this movie is that I don’t get why she didn’t share the door with Jack.  Why did she take the whole door for herself and make Jack hang on in the freezing cold water?  If there wasn’t room for both of them on the floating door, why didn’t they take turns?  Rose is lying on the door, and she’s whining about how cold she is, and Jack, completely submerged in the freezing cold water, is giving her a pep talk about how she’s going to die an old lady warm in her bed.  So fine, she lets him die, but if she loved him so well, why did she rip his cold dead fingers off the door and push him into the water?  He was fastened on pretty good by the time he was frozen to death.  Why didn’t she tote him with her and give him a proper burial at home?  What a jerk.  If the man I loved, who had just single-handedly saved my life heroically and repeatedly, died right before my eyes because I wouldn’t share the door, I would at least not be such a jerkoff about it after I’d murdered him.

The only sexy parts of the movie involve Leonardo DiCaprio.  Even when Rose is lying naked on the fainting couch, the only sexy part of the scene are the close ups of Leo’s eyes while he’s drawing her.  And the prettiest thing in the entire movie is when Leo is standing at the top of the Grand Staircase in front of the clock in his borrowed tux and slicked back blond hair and he turns around to look at Rose.

["Hi. I'm here to save your life, fatso."]

It must suck to be Kate Winslet in this picture and be all dressed up and still be only the 4th or 5th most attractive thing in the movie, after your male co-star and Kathy Bates' giant hats.

Jack isn’t just a gorgeous specimen, he’s resourceful.  The hottest thing about Jack is that he knows exactly what to do.  There is nothing hotter than a man who knows what to do, especially in situations where you don’t know what to do.  Like when a giant boat becomes perpendicular with the ocean and cracks in half.  Here are all the things he knows: He knows to be on the half that goes down second, and then he knows to stay on the boat as long as possible, and to get as high up on one end as possible, and to get on the other side of the railing so they can sit on the railing instead of hanging from it.  And then, as the ship is on its final descent into the sea, he even had his arm around her and is protecting her and he gives her directions and tells her that the ship is going to suck them down and to take a deep breath when he tells her to and to kick for the surface.  He says, “Keep kicking and do not to let go of my hand!”  I mean, this guy is a gem, and even though I do not like this movie, I get totally sucked in every time I see this part, and then he says, “We’re gonna make it, Rose. Trust me.”  And Rose says, “I trust you, and as soon as I get my hands on a floating door, I’m gonna toss you off of it.  Oh, and by the way, I have a life preserver and you don’t.”  Then, when they fall in the water, HE FINDS THE DOOR!  She has a life vest and he doesn’t and he comes over and finds her and he gets her to swim to the door and he puts her on it and she just lies there and is like,

["How’s the water, sucka?"]

So, I don't even like this movie, and still, I just wail my way through this whole part, and I don't know if it's because the Jack character is so impossibly cool that he could never, ever have existed in real life, or because I know that any man I am ever with is likely to rip the life preserver off my back and swim away on a door leaving me to freeze to death in the North Sea.

I almost had a Puerto Rican girlfriend

On Sunday before the Gay Pride Parade, A and I met A's trainer, J, and J's friend, D, for breakfast at Nookie's.  The server was wearing denim short shorts.  He looked like Jessica Simpson in that Pizza Hut commercial.

What would you order for breakfast if your dining companions look like this?

[D and J]

These guys were so fit, I could feel my rolls of fat just pouring out onto the table.  I wanted to hide or be wearing a burlap sack or something.  And then I got the breakfast burrito, which was embarrassing.  When it came, J looked at me like, "Nice plate, pig-girl."  I ate the eggs out of the middle and the fruit on the side and left the rest.  The restaurant was filled with gays getting their egg on before the parade.  It was hot.  A and I started sweating, which is someting we do a lot.  D was surreptitiously pouring champagne into our orange juice glasses under the table.  His muscles were intimidating me.  My abs were exhausted from trying to suck them in.  And failing.

Then J's friend M arrived with her boyfriend R.  R immediately started telling racist Mexican jokes, about 35 of them in rapid-fire succession:

Q: What do you get when you cross a Mexican with an octopus?
A: I don't know, but it could sure pick a lot of lettuce.

It went on and on.  I laughed loudly to be polite.  And also because the jokes were hilarious.  But it was totally wrong.  It was wrong to be telling the jokes, and wronger still to be laughing so enthusiastically.  It was making him tell more jokes.  A moved closer to me, as if to brace for an attack.  There was not going to be any end to the inappropriate Mexican jokes.  I wanted to change the subject to something less offensive, so I said to R, "Do you know any dead baby jokes?"  No one at the table had heard of them, and I didn't tell any, even though I know a lot of them.

Q: What is funnier than a dead baby?
A: A dead baby in a clown costume.

Q: What is the difference between a baby and an onion?
A: No one cries when you chop up the baby.

Q: What is the difference between a dead baby and a water melon?
A: One's fun to hit with a sledge hammer, the other one's a water melon.

Q: What is the difference between a baby and a dart-board?
A: Dart-boards don't bleed.

Q: How do you make a dead baby float?
A: One glass root beer, two scoops baby.

Instead, R started telling "Yo momma so fat" jokes.  These were worse, though less offensive, because fat mommas are not a legally protected class of citizens.  M was putting her arm around jokey R.  She was so proud.  A leaned over to me and said, "They need to get married."  I leaned over to A and said, "They must get married immediately.  She's the only one who will ever have him.  They're two peas in a pod."  M looked up dead baby jokes on her iPhone and started reading them.  I pretended to be offended with everyone else, even though I wasn't.  I had unconsciously backed my chair away from the table because I was so uncomfortable.  A had backed up too and was practically sitting in my lap.  D was frantically pouring the champagne.  We didn't say it out loud, but we were going to drink our way out of the situation.  A said to me, "D is saving humanity right now."

We left to go to the parade.  Except, you can't go to a parade sober, and it's Chicago, so you can't drink out on the street unless you have something to put your liquor in, so there was a line around the block to get into the 7-11 at Roscoe and Halsted.

[D, J, and R --

"What do you call Mexican basketball? Juan on Juan"]

While D, J, R, and M stood in line for Slurpees, A and I stood out in the parking lot with all the gay high school kids.  The sidewalk was crawling with morbidly obese gay Americans in various stages of undress.  It's true that it was very hot and muggy out, but people were really doing it up, and very few of them in a good way.  Well, the whole point is to let your freak flag fly, so I was happy for them and enjoying it.  I started to think how funny it was that when I was at breakfast I was worried that my top might be too tight.  A was wearing white linen shorts and a button down shirt.  We looked like squares who accidentally showed up not knowing what was going on.  I don't know if A felt as comfortable as I did.  He said, "This is what it sounds like when doves cry."

D gave us Slurpees and poured cosmos into them.  After drinking 97 ozs of blue Slurpee laced with cosmo, we were ready for the parade.  I got hit on a little bit, which made me happy:

PUERTO RICAN GIRL: What kind of Slurpee is that?
ME: Blue
A: I think she was looking for different information.

Later, the Puerto Rican girl had procured her own blue Slurpee and she offered me a taste.  I declined.  A said that she was flirting with me.  I didn't really pick up on that, but I liked her.

She was really tough, and I thought I could be the girly girl in the relationship and we could have a lot of fun drinking blue Slurpees together and wearing our hair in aggressive-looking buns.

While we were standing there, a [girl?] started puking on the side walk.  We backed away to give her some space, and then moved back when she was done.  A pilot with a roller suitcase on his way home from O'Hare, was fighting his way through the crowd, just cursing his realtor for letting him buy a condo in Boystown.

Then the parade started.  The CPD mounted came through first, followed by a float for the Governor, and this is Illinois, so no one really knows who our Governor is.  A said, "I was hoping to see something a little gayer than Pat Quinn."

I assure you that he got his wish.

[Not the gayest thing at Pride by far]

I'm sorry I ruined the cheese

To the people I met for the first time last night at the first party: I'm sorry I dropped the cheese plate down the stairs.  But let's be clear: I don't care what you call it -- that was really more of a ladder than a staircase.  Still, I'm sorry I ruined the cheese situation for everyone.

To the people I met for the first time last night at the second party: I'm sorry I dropped my plate of quiche and it went all over your hard wood floor.  I don't know why I can't hold onto cheese-based party foods.

To the guy who took me to the parties, and my girlfriend who's known me for 18 years, both of whom gave me those dirty looks: I am sorry that I embarrassed you in front of all those strangers.  Those were nice parties and nice people we were meeting and the cheeses were classy and I know I was behaving badly and was not in control of my faculties.  I would blame it on the fact that I'd been drinking for eight hours straight, but that's a lame excuse.  The truth is, I'm clumsy, and I know it, and I don't know why, knowing that, I don't move a little slower.  I don't know why I was flinging my hips and the cheese around.  I have no explanation.  To my credit, things could have been worse: I almost fumbled a bottle of red, but I caught it before it hit the floor, and I also only narrowly avoided knocking over that elaborate seashell collection, but someone grabbed me while I was brushing by the cabinet and he stopped me from taking it all the way to the logical, terrifying, party-stopping end.

I'm sorry that I smoked in the bathroom.  I don't know why I did that.

Yes I do.  They didn't have a balcony.  And I felt like I needed to escape after I'd made a fool of myself and I knew that you were upset with me and weren't going to console me.  I knew I was supposed to go stand in the corner and be quiet for awhile until people started to forgive me about the quiche.

I'm sorry I kept swearing so loudly.  And then apologizing.  And then the swearing that came after all the apologizing probably seemed insincere.  My brain knew that I was really making you mad, but my mouth just kept swearing.

I'm sorry that I was wearing flip flops when the other party-goers were wearing real shoes.  I kind of knew when I was dressing myself that I was going to insult people with my footwear, but I didn't care.  Now I do, but I know it's too late to go back in time and not wear flip flops.

I'm sorry I called my ex-boyfriend and chatted with him in front of everyone.  That was a strange choice.  And I'm sorry that he kept texting me to come out and meet him, because I could tell that you both wanted to punch me in the face.  But when I met someone who knew him, it got me to thinking he would have understood better than you did about what was happening with me and the cheese.  I mean, wouldn't you agree that the cheese really seemed like it was out to get me last night?

I'm sorry I took one billion pictures of the moon from inside and kept saying, "Look at that MOON!" really loud.  I know that people probably got the point after the first time I said it.  I don't know why I needed so many pictures and had to keep TALKING about it.

But then again, did you SEE that moon last night?

Probably not.

Because you were cleaning up the quiche.

I'm sorry.