Sunday Top 10: Cuter Overload

I've heard about Cute Overload Dot Com before--I believe we made fun of it in the nerve scanner blog two or ten thousand times. Apparently it also won a Webby Award. Arguably, the word "webby" is--for my taste--a bit of a cuteness overload in and of itself. But if I were to win a Webby, which is clearly really quite likely, I would totally take that back.

But then I saw it in Bust magazine, which is like, mos def. in my top ten favorite magazines, behind Dog Fancy, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker and American Scrapbooking. (HA! Guess which one of those magazines I actually do read every month and I'll give you a hint: I don't like dogs, I don't live in Idaho, and I'm not very "smart").

Bust has been right about everything so far (except for 1. "Luna Pads"--if y'all know what I'm talking about you know what I'm talking about and 2. not publishing the photo Adam took of me and Malaina pretending to make out at the Craft-Tacular in Williamsburg), so I was like, okay, maybe I could use an "overload" of "cuteness."

Um. EW!! It's more or less a plantation of fodder for snarky blogging, possibly even moreso than familiar targets like The L Train, George W. Bush, and America's Next Top Model. But seriously I'm also not "into animals" because I'm sort of "allergic to them" and "can barely take care of myself let alone another living creature"¹, and this whole website is just photos of "cute" animals. (You say AWWW I saw AHH!!!). So if Justin Timberlake can take SEXY BACK, I can take CUTE BACK.


TOP TEN THINGS THAT ARE CUTE BUT WITHOUT ALL THE OVERLOAD

10. I think it's cute when you plug in someone's ipod and it's "name" shows up on your itunes. Like mine is named Sparky McNanostien, because it's Jewish, like me. In fact, I find ipod-naming SO cute that if you were to comment on this blog and share your ipod's name, I might feel just like the commenters of CO felt about the death of Sparky the Hamster (this is allegedly a pre-death photo, p.s.), which would be to "Send lots and lots of penguin kisses and furry paw kneadles and big bear hugs to you." Yup. REALLY. PENGUIN KISSES, BITCHES.


9. Because I'm 12, Stephanie and I played dress-up in my roommate Maggie's closet last night, at about 2 AM, when we were drunk and Maggie was out of town. Steph kept these socks on the whole time. They might be cuter than these gross 2nd-grade-teacher animal-related socks.


8. As much as I want to hate the entire line of PINK by Victoria's Secret, and as much as I'm bitter that I'm too old to really wear anything from PINK, I think that young ladies wearing Victoria's Secret Pink hoodie/underwear combos are far cuter than women who PUT CATS DOWN THEIR SHIRTS.


7. Normally I'd be ashamed to tell you that I have a huge, neverending, eternal crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and that I think he looks good in a Santa hat. But that was before another human person who calls herself "barbie" wrote "OH MY! What a sweet guinea pig! I want to kiss it's mouth!!!" and I realized that there is no more dignity left in the world. I think JTT has a sexy voice.


6. In my former life, I lived in a condo in the suburbs with wall-to-wall-carpeting and my live-in boyfriend. I drove an SUV, made dinner every night from the Betty Crocker cookbook, and shopped at Wal-Mart and Big Lots. Also, we had a dog named Oscar.
actual conversation, circa December 2002:
My then-boyfriend:Marie, I think you love Oscar more than you love me.
Me:That's probably true.
The first photo I ever took with my ghetto digital camera was, I admit, of Oscar. Because he was my only friend. He was cute. I miss him. He misses me, 'cause after I got the hell out of dodge, Oscar had to go live with my ex at the Phi Sigma Kappa house. You can imagine that.


5.What looks cuter in a Superman outfit, a dog or my ass?


4. Last night we went to see "Short Bus," the new John Cameron Mitchell Film, and y'all should go see it, too! Anyhow, now I have another homosexual man to crush on. He played "Ceth" and he is much cuter than a cat being force-fed to a goddamn flower.


3. This uh--(ferret? weasel? jabberwocky?)--has got nothin' on the fab drinking skills of Krista, Ingrid, and Marie, and plus, we look cute the whole time.

This is what happened to us a few hours later:


2. While we're talking about drinking, I also would like to show how cute my toothy grin is. I know JC hasn't gotten into the BIG-GRIN action yet, but he will. This baby llama has tried to pull it off, but failed, miserably, unlike my friends Haviland and Stephanie (and JC, who will be grinning soon enough!), because we are cuter than llamas.


1. OK. Even my cold, animal-hating heart thinks that this, maybe, kinda, sorta, a little bit....is cute. Monkeys are cute. Jesus. I've been looking at photos of chickadees and cats wearing sweaters and porcupines in cooking bowls for like, two hours. Wanna know a secret? Sometimes I see a puppy and think 'I'd like to have a puppy, as long as it didn't have needs.' Which is also how I feel about people I think.
"some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this."
-Kelly Clarkson

¹. Just ask Uncle Bud the Mouse (RIP 1993) and Picky-Pinky the Hamster (RIP 1989), wait, you can't, they're dead.

Cause We Know How to Treat You Right in the House of Blue Light

Today's Topics: The party for that fantastic/horrific building "BLUE", The SHARE benefit at Chelsea Piers, The fact that tonight at the 34th street subway station, "Gereldine,"** the fiancé of my ex, "Randolph,"** introduced herself to me, said she recognized me from the marie claire article (which, for the record, she totally disapproved of), and then after five minutes of painful conversation said "Well, this is awkward, I should go" as if this situation of HER DESIGN that I just described isn't like, OBVIOUSLY THE EPITOME OF AWKWARD?!!! God. I avoid people I KNOW, let alone people I'VE NEVER MET BEFORE who have like, slept with my future husband. Of course, at this rate, I'll never have a future husband. Nor will I ever live in BLUE, but that's because it reminds me of the tile in the showers at the Ann Arbor YMCA.

So I have this theory about New York, like about how it's impossible to really do anything? I mean, you've gotta make some cuts somewhere. This is actually a pretty complicated theory with a lot of geometric shapes involving the complex relationship between time and life (despite what we were told as children, those two things do NOT work well together). I'll describe the specifics another time (there it is again, TIME, that bastard!), like maybe this weekend. But for now:

In the past, when I "went to work a lot," I took my cutbacks in the Social Department. This was easy because it's hard to get me out of the house; I don't like other people, I usually lived somewhere around Calcutta, I'm generally riding the wave that is Chase Overdraft Protection and my window of fun-drunk time (anchored by sober time on one end and tired-drunk time on the other) is pretty small; we'll say about 3 hours max. Now that I'm mostly "working from home," I feel like I'm making that "going to work" cutback and so I need to amp up the Social, and also I'm really into these things:
1. Free drinks ("free" also means that I'm someone's "date" to a "not free" event, like the cruise)
2. Excuses to wear Outfits
3. Events where there might be photographers or the Snapple Lady.

SHARE had really great wine and food (though I couldn't really eat while double-fisting a POP champagne mini-bottle and a glass of wine), and Haviland Stillwell was one of the celebrity "sous chefs," which meant that she smiled next to a table of amazing cupcakes and looked talented and well-dressed while I got drunk. Since this is a great organization that does wonderful things for women with breast cancer, and I did meet the Snapple lady there, I can't really make fun of it. But I CAN SAY that the wine was so good that on Ninth Avenue, before dropping me and Hav back off at home (and by that I mean Hav's home) Karen parked her BMW, turned up the tunes and she and I did the twist in the street like we were in "From Justin to Kelly." It was HOT.

Stephanie works at Corcoron (not to be confused with the "Stephanie" on the Corcoran website who you ought to contact if you'd like to live inside a mosaic) and so we went to the Blue Bash to get drunk. Some genuis party-planner decided to make mojitos for the masses of clamoring people, like, with fresh limes, and we had to wait in a huge mass of men in royal blue shirts and messenger bags and young ladies (who were basically on another ozone level since Steph is 5'9 and I'm 5'10) while the bartender like, basically went to Mexico, started a lime farm, grew a bunch of limes, and then squeezed them into our drinks individually along with peppermint she grew out of her ass while we were all aging and not aging well.

We played the drink tables like a game o' roulette and by the time they ran out of drink, we were good and likkered up.

Then we found out there were no bathrooms. (Full disclosure: the building is not completed. There are also no walls.) Because if they put bathrooms there, people would get them confused with the windows since the windows look like shower curtains. So we went to my second-favorite architectural monument:

Back at the party, everyone was done imagining what their lives would be like if they could afford to buy an apartment (this is how things work in my fantasy life where everyone is as poor as me). Stephanie and I were long gone, Cool, Drunk and only out the .99 cents we had to pay to get fries to use the bathroom. This was the scene we left behind for grease and urination:
Holla.

**NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED.

Sunday Top Ten: Things That Make Me Cry

My publicist¹ still has my camera, which contains the documentation of my 250th birthday party, which WAS A TIME. So...in lieu of the ladies and the kissin,' I'm gonna talk about crying. I know, this seems like a departure from my general commitment to producing physical sensations abbreviated with some of our favorite acronyms (yes, I'm talking about you, LOL. ew.), but crying, or COL, is also funny.

I'm thinking about crying because, like many of us who are a bit fucked up, I live with the constant suspicion that sooner or later, people will discover that I am Awful and that I am a Bad Person, and so I'm always surprised when a birthday comes around and I receive more love than I suspect I deserve. In fact, IT MAKES ME CRY.

I'm not a big fan of sentiment. In fact, I could consider my life thus far to be one huge crusade against Sentiment, much to the dismay of people who have Tried to Have Emotions In Front of Me (I'm better in print. but out loud--that's a lot to handle). So, although I've successfully trained myself to rein in my tears for Sad or Hurtful events, in the process I've become a bit of a lush about crying over Beauty. And Happiness.

Fuck. I just did it again! I just got all teared up from the last scene in the season finale of "South of Nowhere," which I have seen NO LESS THAN ONE ZILLION TIMES already.


TOP TEN THINGS THAT MAKE ME CRY LIKE MRS. SOAMES²

10. Birthday Cards from Good Friends. They get me every time. In fact, I keep 'em. And then when I clean my room, I read them again and I feel like Stuart Smalley. Gets me kinda misty. Rain-forest-y, even.

9. There's this recording from the season finale of the first American Idol of Kelly Clarkson singing "A Moment Like This" right after she won, and she goes "Some people wait a lifetime for a--" and then her voice totally cracks because she's so overwhelmed with emotion from winning American Idol!! and then I totally cry.

8. Seeing people who I care about do amazing things that show how talented they are makes me cry. On the cruise, they had this cool thing where you could watch the shows on the TV in your room, which is pretty much the laziest thing ever but when I didn't make it into the 7pm showing of "Broadway Belters" (you can already see that I am about to talk about crying, musical theater, and a gay family cruise, so basically if I was a guy talking about this, you could safely assume I would never get laid again) so I saw it on video. And when Haviland, dressed like a wedding cake ornament, started singing 'Defying Gravity,' yup--I started crying! And THEN when I was watching the show live--CRIED AGAIN.

7. OK, this is sort of unrelated to happy-tears, but still it's weird. So I read This Blog by Rachel, who just started her junior year at Interlochen (which is pretty much where I'd like to be pretty much forever), and she linked to an essay by her writing teacher, Kate Angus, about crying in New York City, and it was really good. And also it made me cry.

6. When Pete hugged me and thanked me for helping Krista write her essay to get into Yale, I cried. Yeah, like tears almost fell out of my eyes. Just being happy that someone I love has someone lovely who loves her, and that she got into Yale, and that she actually thinks I had something to do with it, when clearly she was more than qualified to get in, regardless of any hungover essay-doctoring I performed, like, moved me.

5. I cried when I got my passport.

4. I cry (present tense, because I can't say for certain that I won't watch it again. And again.) at the season finale of Sex and the City when Magda tells Miranda "You are good. This is good." I also cried in the season finale of Sex and the City when Big asked the girls if he should go get Carrie. I cried in the season finale of Sex and the City when Samantha told Smith-Jerod she cared about him more than she ever has for any other man in her life. However, I did not cry when Big told Carrie she was "the one."

3. Sometimes Stephen Dunn writes such beautiful poems that it makes me cry just to think about it. Like "The time I thought I was in love, and calmly said so, was not so different from the time I was truly in love, and slept poorly and spoke out loud to the wall." BEAUTIFUL! Hey, wanna know what SD says about crying:

I have had such privilege
and have wept
the admittedly small tears
that issue from it, and for years
have expected some terrible random tax
for being born or staying alive.

2. Sometimes (like yesterday) I'll be happy, and something (like the Indigo Girls' new album, 'Despite Our Differences') will come on my ipod, and I will cry. Because of THE BEAUTY. Of, like, IT ALL.

1. So, to Haviland, Janet, Stephanie, Katy, Nicole and Cameron: Thank you for coming out for my birthday. And to My Mother, My Grandparents, My Brother, Natalie, Ingrid, Krista, Scot, Tara, Lainy, Jenni, Maggie, Jeremiah, Malaina, Stephen, Karen, Sherri, Christina, Lauren, J-Nads and Jordan Catalano, thank you for: 1. remembering it was my birthday, 2. taking it upon yourself to wish me a happy birthday.

YOUR LOVE MAKES ME CRY.

Also I just read this fantastic article in Women's Health about why we cry. And how women cry more than men.

¹Ha! I don't have a publicist. But wouldn't it be cool if I did? Yeah it would. Holla! (cameron has my camera. she's my agent, which is close. to publicist. relatively.)
²Mrs. Soames, in Our Town, says: "Don't know why it is, but I always cry. I just like to see young people happy, don't you? Oh, I think it's lovely."