it's been a bad month for blogging: our gargantuan back-to-school issue has been wolfing down all of my time at the office, and our handy-dandy freeloaded-(with-permission)-from-the-neighbors internet service has been nonexistent (you get what you pay for, yeah, fine). i had a lovely and terribly nuanced response to alison/bluishorange's letter to the internet from 2001 last week, for instance, but pounding it out here (read: casa de ladymag) after hours did not appeal. i would do anything for love, internets, but i won't do that.
figgy shower gel, magical. joe's favorite new products get weird nicknames almost immediately: ben & jerry's oatmeal cookie chunk ice cream is cookiepuss! (exclaimed), and korres fig showergel from the beauty closet here at the office is figgy! (exclaimed at greater volume, since he's in the shower). the stuff is very good, which is kind of a problem: who can spend $11 on showergel, even if the sexy greek packaging makes you feel like a cosmonaut? this is the heartbreak of the beauty closet. we pretty much never have to buy hair products or bath fripperies, and the stuff we use is more luxe than what we would buy, but it's almost never the same product twice. for every hit, there's a 'wickedly hot chocolate' bubble bath (shudder).
fondue takedown. i got a note from matt, the man behind the manhattan chili takedown i was so pissed about missing a few weeks ago; it seems he's organizing a fondue extravaganza along the same lines ($10 to enter, $8 to scarf), which i'm even more pissed about missing (it's this sunday the 22nd, when we'll be in california). new yorkers, go forth in our absence and make us proud! i expect a full report on this, as well as recipe ideas (and possibly a fedexed box of cheese).
jacob and megan gettin' hitched (teh win!). it's awfully gauche to break someone else's engagement news, but listen: i've kept quiet for a week, which is millennia in my wedding-obsessed and utterly-non-secret-keeping world. also, megan was one of those magical girlfriends who makes your friend even more awesome than he was before; that she's now his fiancée should surprise exactly no one who's seen them together. if you were out in hell's kitchen last sunday and saw someone on their fire escape doing a weird little troll-dance of happiness, well, that was me.
joe's 30th birthday (and related neuroses). there was some aggressive pouting in the lead-up, and some panic on my part concerning gifts (joe is one of those terrible people who says they don't want anything but mixed nuts and tube socks for christmas and then gets you something fantastic), but all was well that ended well: he realized that being thirty was much less painful than thinking about being thirty, we had a crazy seventeen-course dinner with friends at zenkichi, an izakaya in brooklyn, and i gave him a robot painting. also, as gmail's 'ads and related pages' bar reminds me as i compose this, kool & the gang says there's no age limit on cool. um.
moles, suspicious. i finally, finally got in to see a dermatologist to follow up on the skin cancer screening i flunked at work, and it was not good. the appointment was of the your-copay-is-pennies-so-we're-getting-you-in-and-out-of-here-as-quickly-as-possible-to-make-room-for-the-fancy-laser-peel-ladies variety, and the doctor spoke so fast i could barely understand what he was saying; the one time he slowed down was when he first saw the spots on my back, at which point he and his assistants aauugghh!ed in unison. i'm due back in two weeks to find out if they're little spots of evil. i shouldn't talk this way, but i can't say that i would be shocked if they are cancerous: i remember girls coming to class in junior high with big bandages on their faces from their first removals (hooray for southern california, land of human jerky). i'm expecting the worst, then, but hoping for at least some credit for being lily-white since i stopped jumping around in tidepools as a kid.
ratatouille. for once, a viable flick at the ziegfeld (beautiful theater, always shows third-tier children's movies*)! ratatouille's reviews, both in the press (the nytimes and the new yorker) and via blogs, have been positive enough that joe actually agreed to see it with me. he wasn't that impressed, but i thought it was winning and clever; i'm a sucker for vermin, and brad bird's themes are decently meaty (a nice surprise for a pixar movie). also: NO RANDY NEWMAN! far be it from me, most of the time, to wish strangers ill - but that guy should be launched into space.
*rumor has it that the owners want so very badly to turn their prime midtown real estate into a mcskyscraper that they book shitty flicks on purpose; in theory, bad receipts would make it a bit easier for them to rezone the property.
I'm with you. Doctors blow. "Here, take this antibiotic; it should clear that right up. [Four weeks.] Why didn't that work? Here, take this one. [Two weeks.] There's still a little bit there. Take this." This is a rundown of my last ear infection, handled about, oh, eight or nine months ago--which included a round of (I shit you not) steroids. And that was just an ear infection; this is cancer we are talking about.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, one of my former paralegals discovered that he had testicular cancer. Which goes to prove that it is really a crapshoot sometimes. He's a Wheaton grad, straight arrow, missionary who does nothing harmful to his body except for the occasional bottle of beer. I have three or four red-flag, wailing siren traits (smoking, stress, weight, etc.). He gets cancer, I don't. Stupid, and sad (except that he, like you, caught it early and thus should have no long term problem).
Or, at least, that is the hope in these parts. Kick that mole's ass.
PS: Jacob's getting married? Yay!
all hail the trip to california! we don't have cheap fondue, but we do have taco loco! (sadly, also no longer as cheap as 10 years ago)
ReplyDeletethe last time i had a mole removed, i also felt like i was on an assembly line of "head 'm in, move 'm out". and i think they did a crappy job because of it. fortunately it was benign. thankfully, health insurance through uci blows all other ppo's and hmo's out of the water. i heart school!
call me whence you arrive in the oc!
you know, getting a mole removed might not be the worst thing that will ever happen to you -- chris had one removed from his back last year, and the stitching back up of his skin resulted in a magnificent scar that bears an uncanny resemblance to our lady of guadalupe. it's rather glorious.
ReplyDeletethanks tom!
ReplyDelete