The Girl Who Knew Too Much

On Saturday, I went to my friend Caroline's house to help her decorate (tis the season and all), where I discovered the joys of a show called Rude Tube. It consists of a host, a number of YouTube clips, and a few interviews with the stars of said clips. Now, for starters, this is a brilliant business model and must be even more cost-effective than reality TV, given that it reuses grainy-ass YouTube footage. However, that's not the point.

There was a section devoted to animal videos. This is where I shine, people. So, while my friends sat, enraptured by these alternately enchanting and amusing frolics, I was able to provide (probably unwanted) additional commentary. Debbie loves cats? "It's fake, but it's funny." Baby monkey rides pig? "It always bothers me that he's riding it backward." Nyan cat? "Yeah, that's what the whole song sounds like." Seagull stole camera? "Asshole bird. The guy had to climb a wall or something to get his camera back." I really hope this was a rerun, because I'd seen...well, pretty much all of the clips. By the conclusion of the show, my friends both looked rather alarmed that this is apparently how I spend my life.

Reflections on Glitter

It's been driving me nuts—the smell of one of my face creams consistently reminds me of something, but I couldn't think of what. I've been using the cream for probably two months now, and I just this second realized what it reminded me of: It smells like the roll-on body glitter I had when I was about four years old. I had two kinds, gold and sort of generic iridescent, and I loved them to death. It seemed the height of elegance to cover oneself in glitter, especially when that involved extending the glitter theme to one's hair as well via silver glitter hairspray. Of course, the silver hairspray and the iridescent roll-on went together; one didn't use the silver with the gold. Heavens, no! I was a very particular kid.

So when did I reach the point where body glitter changed from being the ne plus ultra in fashion to something that seems rather tacky, best suited for college freshmen in tube tops and kids at raves? Perhaps I have grown boring....

Leia, Leeloo, and Me

Aaand it's over. Unless you're on the west coast, in which case you have just under an hour till it's officially November 1st. So party hard in memory of those of us who are about to sleep. We salute you.

These year's most popular costumes (that I saw, at least) seemed to be the slutty bumblebee, slutty ladybug, hockey players, and the Joker. (Him? Still?) Pirates seem to still be de rigeur. Especially slutty pirates, of course. Unsurprisingly, I saw at least one slutty version of pretty much everything tonight...including slutty Belle from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Huh.

I saw a number of themed-costume groups at the pub, including Doc Brown, Marty, and George McFly (Doc Brown invited me to the party), six Madonnas at different stages of her career (including the Like a Virgin and Material Girl videos, A League of Their Own, and the Gaultier cone bra ensemble), and a whole slew of Star Wars people. I think my girl card is on the verge of being revoked—I actually recognized Count Dooku. Also in attendance were Obi Wan (Alec Guinness Obi Wan, not Ewan MacGregor Obi Wan), Darth Vader, an excellent Anakin, and slave Leia. And slave Leia was amazing. Pretty girl, great costume, and the body necessary to rock it.

On the completely opposite end of the scale (pun semi-intended), was the girl dressed as Leeloo from The Fifth Element. Her costume was dreadful (looked like it was made of colored tape and she wore it over incongruous gold spandex pants), she was too heavy to get away with the ensemble, and she committed the cardinal sin of cutting the entire line for the ladies' room (and taking her sweet time once inside). And this was a long freaking line—I waited 40 minutes. I think the only reason nobody said anything to her was that she looked exceedingly drunk and had the approximate physique of a rhino. Still, if all the angry ladies in line had banded together, we totally could have taken her. I would gladly have landed some literal blows for the cause.

On that note, hope your Halloween was happy, full of slave Leias and minus rude Leeloos and long bathroom lines. Have taken off my ruby slippers* and am heading to bed.

*I wasn't Dorothy again (I did that in third grade)—I was the Wicked Witch of the Lower East Side.

'Twas Not So Brillig

I was totally baffled by the headline from yesterday's NY Daily News (no, I don't read that rag, but there was a copy sitting on the kitchen table in my office). It said: Joba Wacky. Now, I eventually guessed that Joba was the name or nickname of some sports figure who was arrested for DUI. (He's evidently a Yankee named Joba Chamberlain.) And I guess he was acting wacky...? Seemed like a stretch. So I passed this apparently nonsensical headline every time I walked through the kitchen. Finally, it struck me—it's a play on Jabberwocky.

Now, maybe I was being a little dense to not have realized that before. But if I didn't realize that until the, say, tenth time I read the headline, is this a pun that the average Daily News reader will ever get? I'm not trying to sound pompous, but (in true lit-mag dork fashion), I had the whole damn poem memorized at one point. Seems like a rather stupid move for a paper known for its punny, painfully obvious headlines.

In case you're interested, here's a link to one of the few pics of yesterday's front page that I could find online.

Sleep Helmets for All!

Okay, I don't sleep run, but in other respects this dog reminds me of myself when I'm asleep. Poor, poor doggie.

A Dream of Epic Proportions

If you're one of those people who can't abide hearing about other people's dreams, I suggest you skip this post. Move along, nothing to see here.

Last night I dreamt a doozy. It started out unassumingly enough: I was spending Christmas with a fantasy version of my friend Caroline and her family. Caroline and a few of her girlfriends and I were sitting around a tree up in her bedroom, which seems like the sort of thing I'd usually love, except that some of the friends were really irritating. So I got all sorts of snippy and flatly insulted one (and, I believe, the Christmas holiday in general, which is something I, the queen of Christmas, would never do). So they were furious with me and I exiled myself downstairs with Caroline's parents.

This is where it gets creepy. While hanging out with Caroline's parents, a suitcase was delivered for me. It was my old suitcase that had been retrieved from a bus accident I'd been in previously. The bus had gone off a cliff and plunged into the sea. It was full of people, most of whom died. I was one of a few survivors. So I immediately began sorting the contents of the suitcase into piles ("ditch" and "clean/keep"). I somehow knew that not only was it gross to not clean things that had been underwater with corpses for months, but it was also dangerous. It became apparent that the more time you spent around contaminated items, the more likely you were to become obsessed with the wreck and the dead. Someone who looked like Keira Knightley was also one of the survivors, but her boyfriend died on the bus. She became so obsessed that she swam back to the bus to be with her boyfriend and drowned. (Yes, they retrieved our bags, but left the bus full of dead bodies underwater.) So all subsequent appearances in my dream were of ghost Keira.

Undoubtedly the person who became most deranged was Telman, a guy who looked like Kenneth from 30 Rock. First, my company fired him, which he discovered they were planning on doing by accident at a staff meeting—someone left a paper on the table about his firing and Telman noticed it. So he was bitter at the company and then, after spending more time around contaminated items from the bus, became utterly obsessed. The combination was not good. He started trying to infect other people with the obsession (somehow that was possible) and became quite the menace around town. Meanwhile, the company gave me some sort of sorry-you-were-in-a-major-accident stipend of $4,000. Evidently they felt guilty, because, by keeping the two daughters of the bus company owner on staff, they didn't have to get the buses inspected or something. (Yeah, I'm not entirely certain about the logistics here.) Essentially, it boiled down to the fact that my employer was at fault for the bus wreck. I was appalled and felt betrayed. They were trying to buy my silence about their negligence for $4,000. Unfortunately, I don't remember what I did about that. Maybe that part dropped out of my dream.

By this point, Telman had infected tons of people, each of whom could infect more people. The obsessed were like zombies, roaming the streets, looking for more people to contaminate. I'm not sure whether they were alive or ghosts like Keira Knightley. More ghosts—those of the people who died on the bus—had since joined him, too. Noah Bennet from Heroes had been trying to recondition Telman, but I was shocked when I discovered by what means. He attached a pronged metal device (it looked like a very stylized scorpion) to Telman's spine right below the neck and would leave it there, doing its thing (whatever that was), sometimes for two hours at a whack. I don't know exactly what it was supposed to do, but it hurt like hell. I tried it for only a few seconds, and it was agonizing. I made the others who were trying to capture Telman try it, too. Big, burly men were spasming in pain. We were all left with a lot more sympathy for him. Things changed after that. Somehow I reached an accord with Telman and his ghosts: they stopped bothering us and we stopped chasing them, trying to recondition them. Eventually they became quite friendly to those of us who could see them (not everyone could). In fact, my boyfriend (not Afshin, some other random guy who looked a little like a former coworker) ate some crumbs that allowed him to see the ghosts. It seemed very sweet at the time that he wanted to be one of the few who could see and talk to the ghosts.

So it somehow worked out in the end, what with the friendly ghosts and all. There was also some digression about sandwiches and a personable old deli counter guy, but I don't remember where that fit in the arc. I was getting a couple of my friends and myself sandwiches at a rest stop during a bus trip. (In a bus, I should note, shaped like a giant loaf of wheat bread.) Considering my past experience with buses and, well, death, you'd think I'd skip the bus trip. Guess not.

Oh, and I finally apologized to Caroline and her friends for my prior bitchiness. They totally forgave me.

One Night, Two Near-Tumbles

I had a very bad night, mishap-wise, last week. I'd gotten a large peppermint-mocha latte from Starbucks to combat the cold and was walking back to my apartment from the financial district. I was wearing my Dansko clogs, which are extremely comfortable but pose a slight difficulty for me (and, I should add, many others who aren't quite as clumsy as I): Because the sole of the shoe is one solid, inflexible piece, if you step on uneven ground, the shoe tends to roll over rather than bend to accommodate irregularities in the ground. So you basically wind up tripping a lot if you're not careful. Well, I guess I wasn't careful. I tripped in a pothole and wound up doing the please-let-me-catch-my-balance-without-falling-or-spilling-my-coffee dance. For what seemed like an eternity. It was epic. Not this epic, but close. However, I managed to stay upright and—amazingly—only spill some coffee on my coat sleeve.

Later the same night, I nearly rolled out of bed while asleep. Again, in a narrow save, I klonked my elbow on my dresser, which woke me up enough to right myself before I went ass-over-teakettle. The thunk was enough to wake up Afshin, who suggested that, instead of just a sleep helmet, I should really get sleep armor.

So maybe it wasn't such an unlucky night...two near-accidents are better than two actual accidents after all.