My one-woman retaliation

I'm turned off of alcohol and coffee. They know why.

As all five of you know, I barely have a job. This leaves me with a lot of free time on my hands. I spend a good portion of that time getting to know myself, but after a while, that gets old, and I turn to the internet for entertainment. I use StumbleUpon. Sometimes I stumble upon interesting stuff, like feminist blogs and celebrity gossip, but usually it's people's wedding photos or gardening tips. Lately I've been getting a lot of photos of naked women, though, and it annoys the shit out of me, so I spent most of my morning finding pictures of sexy guys and adding them to my favorites. It's sort of an if you can't beat them, join them thing, like how I started calling all men "boy" because I don't think they'll ever stop calling adult women girls. I wonder what would happen if all women did this. Chances are, boys (heh) wouldn't care. But maybe...

The criminal element

So I applied for this private tutoring job on Craigslist and the guy said I got the job and I was really happy... but then he said he was going to Fed-Ex me a package of money and I'm supposed to give some to some guy in Florida, his son's nanny. My mother says this sounds like the work of the Russian Mafia but I don't think they're this clumsy. Who uses Craigslist to find a stranger to launder money for them? You always hear about people committing Craigslist crimes, but it seems like it would be so much easier to launder money and prostitute yourself in the real world, where you don't leave a paper trail. Anyway, I wrote back and said I didn't understand why he couldn't just give the guy the money himself and now I'm wondering if I should call the police. A part of me wonders if my fictional employer has a noble reason to filter money through me, like, maybe he's the one being victimized by some criminal element and he's just trying to save his family but nobody can know where the money went, so he needs to get a stranger to send it to kidnappers in Florida, et cetera. He could be a basically good guy who needed money and ended up getting sucked into something seedy. Or maybe he's a ruthless criminal mastermind. Whatever he is, using Craigslist really makes the whole thing much less cinematic, like, will the new gangsters wear sweatpants and live in their mothers' basements? I guess the way I should be looking at this is, At least someone wanted to hire me.

My weekly one-paragraph book review
Brave New World sucked.

A Japanese Thanksgiving

Things my brother has mixed up:
Jane Eyre and Jane Goodall
Bolivia and Bulgaria
Coup de grâce and coup d'état
Gestapo and gazpacho

Tomorrow is Hirohito's first Thanksgiving. At his first Rosh Hashanah he kissed the Torah, but this time there won't be any uppity religious folk to get all offended, so things will probably go better. Still, we're all surprised that he's still here. He was supposed to have moved on to another family a few weeks ago. Inexplicably, my dad wants to keep him. He's already talking about, "Well, in January we'll get Hirohito moved to the international school," like, January? We're keeping him until January? Ugh. This kid drinks my orange juice and eats my brother's curry and he always wants help with his homework when I'm watching TV and I think he's given up on ever learning English. His sporadic cultural mistakes aren't funny enough to justify how burdensome he is.

Mad in America

I didn't put up my weekly one-paragraph book review this weekend because I was hoping to have finished La heredera del mar by now. Unfortunately, I read Spanish very, very slowly, so no go, and I'll have to review a different book.

My weekly one-paragraph book review: Mad in America, by Robert Whitaker.
So, this is about how the mentally ill have been mistreated throughout American history. It starts with the basic 18th-century torture treatments (wet sheet packs, restraints, et cetera), then goes through EST and lobotomy, and ends with antipsychotic drugs. The author is pretty critical of all of these treatments - his argument is that the mentally ill should just be nurtured and cared for. I guess he has a point, but I feel like this whole book is very one-sided. For one thing, not everyone who got lobotomized became completely blorg, and I've read lots of personal accounts of EST that described it as very beneficial. He quotes Sylvia Plath's negative depiction of EST in The Bell Jar, but if you actually read the book, she goes on to say that the first one was just performed incorrectly and when it's done right, EST is just like going to sleep. I'm too lazy to find the quote. But I'm just arguing for argument's sake; nowadays, EST and lobotomies are mostly considered barbaric. My real problem is that Whitaker super-hates antipsychotic drugs. The first time I read his book, I was like, Wow, these medications are terrible, and I thought that until I talked to people who had first-hand experience with them. These people were definitely pro-medication. My conclusion is that Whitaker is being a bitch and he's not telling the whole story. That being said, I do think an integral part of recovery from mental illness is being treated with respect. I suppose he's right about that.

Of course, I really have no experience with psychosis, so it's entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm talking about. I may take a nap soon.

More periods, please

The strangest thing happened to me yesterday. I can't imagine what came over me.

I was in Barnes & Noble, in the medical section, reading the Jerome Groopman book (B+), and when I finished it, I was worrying about the length of time between my periods, if it was too long, and I picked up some gynecology handbook and looked up menstruation, and there was an entry for premature ovarian failure. The entry was about a paragraph long and not very detailed (I don't think it even listed symptoms), but I started freaking out, like, What if I have this? I'll never have kids. All the time I spend looking at baby clothes and thinking about babies and finding pictures of cute babies online, all of that will go from silly to tragic. I got myself so worked up, I thought I was going to cry in the middle of the bookstore. So I went to my gynecologist to set up an appointment. I wanted to see her that day, and when the secretary asked why, I told her the truth, and all the other secretaries turned around to look at me all agape and she was like, "Let me leave a note for the doctor to call you," which I think means, "I'm doing this to appease you, because I think you're insane."

My periods have always been kind of far apart (around 30 days), but for the past couple months they've been like 32 days apart and they last two or three days, and I know this is weird, but it just sort of makes me feel like less of a woman. All my friends are like, oh, you're so lucky, mine are every 28 days and they last like a week, but I don't feel lucky. I feel masculine. And of course I know that the period doesn't make the woman and I am a woman regardless of how frequent my periods are. I don't know why this makes me so upset.

And now no man will ever read this blog again because it mentioned periods.

Scraping the bottom of the job barrel

I got a job offer! Teaching English in Kiev! At first I thought that sounded promising, but then I Googled Kiev, and now I don't know. It turns out that they "think" the radiation from Chernobyl is no longer a threat (but you're still not supposed to drink the tap water unless it's been boiled - since when does boiling get rid of radiation?). It's also ugly as fuck and the country is experiencing major political upheaval. Plus, most of the Kiev tourism sites emphasize how hot and willing the women are, which is all well and good, except I'm not looking for a wife. On the upside, they mostly speak Russian, so maybe I could learn Russian. Probably the best way to get a legitimate job teaching English abroad is to take one of those TEFL courses and then let your language school place you somewhere. I'm very interested in Eastern Europe. Ever since I fell in love with Prague. (I know, Czechs tell you that they're part of Central Europe, not Eastern Europe, but there is no such thing as Central Europe. There's east and there's west. No matter what you call yourselves, you're still in the sketchy, discontent part of Europe. Embrace it.)

Monday Struggles

The New York City Health Department has created something called the Rat Information Portal, a website dedicated to rat control. You can find out if your neighborhood has a rat infestation problem by clicking on a map (ominously labeled RIP Viewer) that's supposed to show which buildings have been investigated. Chances are, if your building is so overrun with rats that the Health Department actually declares it a problem, you already know about it, but maybe this is for prospective home buyers. Anyway, I can't figure out how to work this map, because none of the areas I click on show any rats, even though I see them all the time.

It's over with Fatty and I think I'm going on a break from dating because it drives me crazy. So much deception, so many annoying habits that just get harder and harder to ignore, and in Fatty's case, so many violations of basic personal hygiene rules. It's a sacrifice, my dating sabbatical, because it's essentially taking a vow of celibacy, which I've heard can lead to psychosis. Luckily, I have a substitute: my Eroscillator, which, unlike a man, is consistently satisfying.

The All-Consuming Baby

Is it that time again? My weekly one-paragraph book review
Last week I read Tina Cassidy's Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born. It made me visibly wince on the train, which may have freaked out other passengers, and even though I love babies that look like me, this book gave me a reason to seriously consider adoption. I don't plan to read a single book on childbirth while actually pregnant. Do those books actually prepare you, or do they just freak you out so much that you start clenching up every time you think about the baby coming out? Anyway, to sum up, this is an interesting but extremely graphic book.

I want a baby. They're cute, they've got great skin, they smell nice, they're cuddly, and if it's mine, it'll look like me. I want a boy and a girl and I already have names picked out and written down and someday, when I have a baby, the father can pick out a name off my list. I also have a list of possible middle names, but those are more flexible. I'm really looking forward to having babies, which is why I'm not reading Ms. Cassidy's book ever again.

Busy busy busy doing very little

I just finished another tutoring session with LE. He passed the math assessment, but had trouble with word problems because he can't read the questions. His mother is now walking with a cane. I was looking over the reading assessment and it struck me that the passage he really had trouble with was about some girl named Mona who's bad at drawing and throws a hissy fit over it, while he did pretty well on the sections about animals. Now, I know what they're trying to do. They're trying to put more stories about girls into the curriculum. They're trying to make it about things girls can relate to, like crying and art. A whole bunch of assholes think that there's some vast scholastic conspiracy against boys and part of the reason girls are graduating at a higher rate than boys is that boys can't comprehend stories about girls and they should only read about sports and barbecuing and such. I'd argue that maybe it's not the sex of the protagonist that's tripping kids up (I say kids instead of boys because I doubt that any child would find this story interesting); it's that the protagonist is a fucking brat who needs to get a grip, and stories like Mona's teach kids that girls are a bunch of crybabies who need constant reassurance.

Irma and Selina are sad because I haven't written about them yet. I've been friends with them since high school and we all decided to start blogs together. (We have a lot of free time because not one of us has a full-time job.) As a group, we enjoy Irma's mother's cooking, Selina's baby girl, brunch, and parties, especially those with alcohol. Don't worry, Selina has these strips that tell her if there's alcohol in her breast milk, and before she has any alcohol she pumps a couple bottles of clean milk for the baby (official name: The Baby), so everything's good. Having a baby has made Selina's breasts so nice, I'm contemplating having one of my own. The only downside is that even though they don't do much besides sleep and eat, they take up a lot of time (who knew?). Irma is currently spending a whole lot of time on her five hundredth novel, which is probably about me even though she says it's not. She and I go on many adventures, including our European adventure in August and our Bronx adventure in July.

I'm paying extra-special attention to police officers because I had a dream that I fell in love with one. He looked kind of like the guy who took Sean in on "Boy Meets World" - i.e. kind of cute but not really. I saw a whole bunch of police officers in Barnes & Noble today, but they were all ladies. Barnes & Noble is fun. I was reading about "the patient experience" in the medical section and some woman came along and she was like, "I'm looking for books on STDs. I want them to have really graphic pictures, because my daughter's been asking me about sex." At first I thought that was fucked up, but then I looked at the books she had already picked out and it was stuff about relationships and sexual fulfillment, which is pretty cool. Also, it's nice that this girl felt comfortable talking about sex with her mom. My mom has counseled me on sex twice. The first piece of advice she gave me was that you should always have sex with the person you're going to marry before you marry them to see if you're sexually compatible. The second was when I asked her if she'd ever had an orgasm and she said, "Who would have sex if they didn't?" Even though that put bad images in my head, I thought it was pretty awesome.

A bachelor's degree in Spanish qualifies me to give nutrition advice, right?

I never hung out with Bachelor #2 last night. He called, we talked, we didn't hang out, which is pretty cool, because it gave me a chance to catch up on Season 2 of "South Park" and eat Cheerios out of the box. You can eat an entire box of Cheerios and you still won't have consumed a whole day's worth of calories, but you will have gotten fiber and vitamins. That's a good tip, kids.

Last night I had my first assignment, this kid from Prospect Heights. He got a 47 on the reading evaluation, which is of course terrible, and I was talking to his mom about it and I was like, "He doesn't seem like he has a learning disability or anything, I think he just needs practice," and then I looked around and I was like, Hm, this house has no books in it. And his mom started talking about how she had lots of doctor's visits because of heart problems and how she was diabetic and got lightheaded a lot and her foot was kind of giving her trouble, and I thought, "Lady, you're five feet tall and you probably weigh 200 pounds. They are going to amputate the shit out of your foot." And I don't wish it upon her or anything, cause she's really nice and accommodating and she really cares about her kids, but it's like, I wish I could say, "You have health problems because you are fat. Your kid has trouble reading because he doesn't read. He doesn't have ADD, he just spends too much time watching TV and playing video games." But even if I said all that to her, it wouldn't make any difference, and who am I to give parenting advice? And she probably knows all of this already. It's just frustrating. These problems are so avoidable.

On a brighter note, I had feta salad for lunch today. It's delicious and in my head, it has less fat than regular cheese. You know how skinny those Greeks are.

Cross one out, move on to the next one

I've kind of got a date tomorrow, and it's not with Fatty. It's with Bachelor #2 from before. I told him I would date him and Fatty until I figured out which one I liked more, then that would be the one I'd go with. That's why he's taking me out instead of trying to get into my pants. Fatty knows nothing about this, and he's looking less and less appealing. He called me a few hours ago to tell me about his day, and apparently he spent a good chunk of it yelling at Best Buy employees and getting thrown out by security. The thought of security guards shoving a fat man out onto the sidewalk cracks me up, but you can't keep a man around just because his stupidity is entertaining.

So, yeah, tomorrow I'm going to hang out with Bachelor #2, who probably needs a new nickname, and we'll probably have a drink and talk about something stupid. He's got such a nice smile. He also has quite the reputation for being completely slimy. I hope I'm not playing mind games with him. He really doesn't deserve that, unless the rumors I've heard have any truth to them.

Santa says shape up!

Backstory: This year, my family has a sixteen-year-old foreign exchange student from Japan. We'll call him Hirohito for anonymity. A few weeks ago, he got in trouble for graffiti (read: writing his name on a building in chalk) when he went on a trip to see a waterfall. This is the letter we got from his grandparents:

"Just when I started to write a letter to you, I heard a kind of scandal caused by Hirohito. My daughter seemed to try to keep this shameful secret uninformed to us but as a bad news runs fast we couple got to know it. We have been greatly depressed to hear the news. I am guessing that Hirohito had been overwhelmed by the breathtaking scene of the waterfall so he might have lost himself and driven to leave his memory or true impression at some place around there. This is only our simple imagination because we don't know the details yet. But, of course such a mischievous and unethical conduct is never permissible. We are really ashamed of the incident and don't know how deeply we apologize to those people... Please accept our sincere apology for our grandson's careless conduct. We are thinking of sending a warning letter to him instead of a Christmas present and having him resolve to concentrate on his initial purpose."

Hirohito's been getting in a lot of trouble, mainly because my brother likes to demonstrate Asian Flush Syndrome to his friends. Still, I can imagine my parents' reaction to my brother writing his name in chalk on some Japanese building:
"Don't do it again. Here, we got you an iPod to replace the six that you lost."

Est. Dollar Value of a BA: $0

I submitted around fifteen resumes this week, some of them for jobs I'm actually qualified to do, and I got three responses, none of which led to interviews, which makes me think I may need to embellish my resume. "It says here you were a dancer for the American Ballet Theater." "Yes, that was after I finished up my MBA at Harvard." Seriously, some of the requirements these people have are retarded. Part of the problem is that I live in New York City and everyone is qualified, so they have to sift through applicants somehow, and of course the economy sucks right now, and then there is the fact that I don't try very hard.

In happier news, I do have a job now (it turns out I always had this job, it's just that things are kind of hectic for them right now and they hadn't gotten around to giving me any assignments, so I thought I'd been fired) and I start work on Monday. I also have my translation work, which is nice. But oh man, I want money. I will get money, by hook or by crook or by working. You'll see.

And now, for my weekly one-paragraph book review (this may or may not be weekly):
I just finished Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I'd read the short story version before and liked it, so I had high expectations, but they were shattered because this book sucks. For one thing, all the footnotes about Trujillo are distracting. Your readers will understand who he is from context, so stop treating us like idiots. Then you have this blatant misogyny, which every single character exhibits. That's another thing: all the characters are the same character, and they're all one-dimensional. And that's all fine, whatever, but this won a Pulitzer, and if this book deserves anything more than a spot on the $1.99 rack at Duane Reade, then my dog should get a Nobel Peace Prize for puking on the rug.
As a side note, I've heard that Mr. Diaz is a complete asshole. I can believe it. He certainly looks like one in the jacket photo.

Easy women get the best men

I can't believe I'm writing two posts in one day. I hope this doesn't become a regular thing. I just have to process this while it's still in my head.

I went to Bachelor #2's house tonight. (First mistake, I know. In December I learned that if a guy invites you over, he wants sex, but it's so difficult to remember, especially when it's raining and you want to hang out. Am I making excuses?) Inevitably, he tried to pull something, and I said no, and he asked why, and then I thought, why, indeed? I find him attractive, after all, and I'm not really dating SpongeBob XXXXXLPants, and it'd probably be fun, so why not? What I said was, "I don't want to sleep with someone if we're not in a relationship," and then I started wondering if every time I say that, I force somebody into a relationship they don't want to be in just so they can get laid. Is it better to just have sex right away and take the pressure off? After all, it's not like a guy is going to show you who he really is before you've had sex, so even if you think you're getting to know him, you're just getting to know whatever aspect of himself he thinks will most appeal to you. And does waiting encourage men to just stay with you because they want to get laid and not because they actually want a relationship? The most successful relationships my friends have had are the ones where they have sex on the second date. Do people wait just because they don't want to think of themselves as easy? Is it because they don't want to sleep with somebody and then end up not liking him and wondering, Why did I ever sleep with that douchebag? (That's actually my reason - how messed up is that?) Should we all be having sex on the second date?

Anyway, I did not have sex tonight, and it's probably for the best, because Bachelor #2 is kind of gross. An outside factor.

Why can't he just lose weight?

I feel a little bad for John McCain. Like, I hated everything he stood for and I support Obama, but McCain's just this little old man who was humiliated in front of the entire country and when he dies, he'll be this big famous failure. He seemed so hopeful. It's like when you go into a nursing home and there's someone waiting by the door and they're like, "My children are coming to see me today!" and then when you leave, they're still waiting. That's what his campaign reminded me of. Sarah Palin, on the other hand... I have no sympathy for her. She's a jerkface.

I may have to ditch Fattie for reasons besides his fat:
1. He's pretty lazy
2. He snores
3. He's basically half-deaf, so he never gets what I'm saying and he watches TV with the volume turned all the way up
4. He keeps saying really disgusting things and then he says he's kidding but he's probably not.
5. He turned his air conditioner on last night. Just open the window, retard, it's like 50 degrees out.
6. His apartment smells sort of like a sweaty vagina.
Oddly enough, though, the fat is growing on me. He's squishy and I like hugging him, but he keeps asking for sex and what do I say? "No, you're too fat"? Sometimes I feel these waves of tenderness for him - can I take those and turn them into sexual attraction? This is a bad situation. Why do I have such terrible taste? The thing is, I really have no taste. I've been thinking about the guys I've dated, and I don't have a type. All they have in common is that they've all got dark hair and with the exception of one, they've all been smokers. Short, tall, fat, thin, muscular, artists, professionals, Ivy League, community college, rich, poor, extremely poor, old, young, well-dressed, sloppy, pale, swarthy, American, foreign-born, smart, dumb, I've dated them all. I have no standards. I simply have no standards.

My civic duties

So, I had jury duty yesterday, and if I'd been a little more goal-oriented, I think it would have been a great place to meet men. There were at least four hotties, and two of them were definitely checking me out, but alas, nobody said anything. I found out their names and occupations and marital status during voir dire. They got picked. I was rejected. The judge asked us if we'd ever been the victim of a crime and I said that when I was four, my house was burglarized and even though the police knew who the perpetrator was, they did nothing to nab him, and then I got to go home. Other than the occasional cutie, jury duty is pretty annoying and people gave all kinds of excuses to get out of it. This one guy said he was a Moravian Christian and it was against his religion to pass judgment, but I googled Moravian Church and their website didn't say shit about jury duty. Plus, it seemed weird that a black guy was part of a Czech church, but I guess there are plenty of black Lutherans and Anglicans and whatnot. Another guy got out of it by saying he couldn't be impartial in a murder case because his cousin was awaiting trial for killing two people. Heh. I don't know if I'd admit something like that, or if I'd care if any of my cousins were awaiting trial. My cousins mostly suck.

Also, I had a super-fun time voting today. I got to wait in line and then pull a lever for Obama, then worry that I'd accidentally pulled the wrong lever, then not care because I live in New York and my vote doesn't really influence anything. Everyone says Obama's a shoo-in, but I prefer not to jinx things.