A fat curling tale...

So I know that skipping school is wrong, and those who are stupid enough to get caught doing it (it takes finesse to know which doors aren't locked and a keen intelligence to plot a path that avoids patrolling teachers and hall monitors) deserve to be punished.
In my day, I skipped school at least twice a week, which was a difficult feat at the Catholic high school I attended because we were never allowed to leave campus and all the doors were always locked (because of Columbine) during the school day except for the one near the visitor center at the front of the school (which of course was monitored.) But, I never got caught. Though I did come close once, the school swimming coach becoming suspicious when he saw my friend and I leave through the gym and return fifteen minutes later with red eyes and placid faces.
"Where you been Maine?"
"Just had to get an assignment out of my car, coach."
He had his doubts, considering I wasn't carrying anything in my hands that would have validated that I had indeed retrieved something from my car. If he would have asked I would have said tampon or maxi pad and that would have shut him up. But there were no further questions, he just let us go back up to lunch.
But what if I hadn't just gone into the parking lot and sat in a car for fifteen minutes? What if, say, once I got into the parking lot I saw that the copper crucifix sculpture, standing erect in the middle of the school's lawn, was engulfed in flames and I came to the rescue by grabbing the fire extinguisher inside the gym and ruthlessly combated the flames, ultimately saving Jesus single-handedly, leaving only tiny marks on the sculpture, which no one minds because it gives it character and it's a good story to tell in the future...
2030:
"And this is our almost 100 year old Jesus-cross thing."
Oh's and ah's from the gathering crowd.
"Mrs. Featherbottom?"
"Yes Thor?"
"What is that black, ashy looking stuff on Jesus' upper thigh?"
"Well Thor, that is the only remaining scar from a terrible fire that
plagued this sculpture years ago, when a heroic student solely (or
souly, maybe in this case) saved Jesus' life."
More oh's and ah's.
"Um, Mrs. Featherbottom?"
"Yes Thor?"
"I thought Jesus was supposed to come back again by now and save all
of us...?"
"Not now Thor..."
etcetera...

So you would think in a scenario like the one above, where I save the flaming Jesus sculpture, and am therefore, due to the mass press such an incident would receive, discovered to have been skipping school that I would be pardoned of the traditional punishment in light of my heroic deed. Right?
Well, school officials in Seaside, California don't agree. A 15 year old girl was given a detention after she saved a load of elementary school children inside a runaway bus. Apparently, the driver fell out of her seat after making a turn (where was her seat belt?) and hit her head, impairing her. (Now, all my bus drivers, and I rode the bus for eight years, were fat and wore floral tent-dresses, so I am wondering how such a big person squeezed out enough to fall from a simple turn? Usually, their fat thighs are lodged underneath the steering wheel and no amount of impact could set them free. Or their thigh fat curls around the edge of the seat, sticking to the vinyl (kinda like this girl), thus also making it difficult to get up and out.) Anyways, she fell and the 15 year old jumped up and pressed on the brakes, saving everyone.
And they gave her a detention because she was skipping school. The 15 year old wasn't feeling well and left school, asking the bus driver for a ride. (Why isn't the bus driver getting any flack for this? Who lets a strange person get on a bus full of children?)
The teacher at the 15 year old's school said, "She is in trouble with school because she made the wrong decision. But I can't help but believe that she was where God wanted her to be."
So maybe if this girl was at my Catholic school she would have gotten off, claiming divine intervention. "God made me skip school to save those innocent children."
Alas, all things come back to the big man in the sky.

Warm Beer, Cold Women

San Francisco is full of beautiful hordes of boys hastily pedaling over the hilly streets of the city with a laid-back ease rarely seen on the flat terrain here in Brooklyn. (God, yes.)
I saw a devastatingly attractive young man riding his bike up a rather steep hill while also holding the handle bar of a vacant bike, riding parallel with it. I was amazed and in love.

When I arrived in San Fran we went out with OA's friends to a party in the Mission. I was talking to some guy from Westchester, NY (coincidence? no, I met at least five people from Westchester in San Francisco.) So this guy starts talking about these incredibly fast concrete slides that he used to go down as a kid and I said "Take me there." Ten minutes later OA, me, this guy and his friend who had a car were driving to the slides.



These luge-like slides were the steepest, fastest slides I'd ever slid down. (The picture doesn't really do it justice.) It's five seconds of stomach-flopping madness before it shoots you out horizontally and gravity finally pulls you down and your ass collides with a hard pile of sand. West Coast kids had it so much better than us Midwestern-raised pups.
After our childish-desires were fulfilled, we walked over to a bench that stood alone on a vacant, green hill that overlooked the entire city. Beautiful.

Next day OA and I went on a hike in the mountains that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. There were wild Elk everywhere and the ground was scattered with vibrant poppy flowers. We stopped on a steep cliff and had a picnic while the eagles that soared above barked at us.







OA: "This looks like one of those allergy commercials."



The following day OA and I took to the hilly streets on our bikes, cycling up a tall, winding path to Twin Peaks. (I was looking at a map my first day there and pointed my finger on Twin Peaks and said, "There. Take me there.")




Afterwards, we biked back down, which isn't any better than biking up, because while it is less strenuous, it is completely terrifying. I was going down hills at such a sharp incline that I felt like I was going to flip over the top of my handle bars as I was applying the brakes the entire way down. At last we arrived at Delores Park, bought locally brewed, delicious beers and laid in the sun.




Then we went to Zeitgeist, where their slogan is "Warm Beer, Cold Women."
See below:


I love this woman.

Spoiled Dreams And Unsettled Fantasies...

Call me a romantic idealist, or perhaps an ignorant sucker, but I always imagined that NPR’s Brian Lehrer was a dashing and handsome young man. That is until this morning, when I was reading Gawker.com and stumbled across a picture of a hideous old man with a WNYC microphone propped in front of him, sitting in a sound booth. I gasped. NO! Could it be? With a quivering voice and a dry throat I fearfully whispered at my computer screen, “Brian? Is that you?”

No. It simply couldn’t be. Brian is a young twenty-eight-year-old with a full head of wavy dark brown hair. He has a slightly tanned complexion with Zeus-like features and a chiseled collar bone. Every night he wears a maroon silk robe and sips aged scotch while suffused in a cone of moonlight that enters his expansive apartment via skylight to calm himself after a long day's work. He listens to Bruce Springsteen and Chuck Berry! He has 1500 thread count Egyptian sheets! He eats steak!

I vividly imagine (or imagined now, I guess) this sexually charged man every day while making breakfast in my kitchen and listening to (and learning from!) his show. Every morning is a blissful two hours of that rustic, manly voice flowing into my ears as I slurp my coffee and nibble at my eggs with my head dreamily propped up on the back of my dainty hand as I daydream about tenderly kissing the lips that spout out such dictional wisdom. So this ugly, rumpled old man on gawker couldn’t be my Brian; he loves me too much to be homely. Shaking my head in frantic disbelief I ventured out into the vast Internet and discovered that my devastating assumptions were true: the picture of that bald, skinny and likely limp-dicked man was indeed Brian Lehrer.

Now that my only happiness is tainted and ruined and I must find someone else to fantasize about in the morning. (Morning time is my time.) Thank god that I still have Leonard Lopate; I will never EVER google image Leonard Lopate. Oh but Brian, why have you forsaken me?

This should be a forewarning to any other person out there who fantasizes about radio personalities (and we all do): Don’t look at a picture of them! Chances are they are excruciatingly unattractive, their only pleasant quality being their voice—Oh that deep, seductive voice that unfurls every nerve in my body…Damnit!

The honorable money mongrel presiding

Two days ago I went to downtown Brooklyn to defend a ticket I got for riding my bike on the subway platform.

I awoke Molly at 7:30 am and she told me she'd dreamed that our apartment was filled with cockroaches and our fly-annhialating cat was carefully and daintily prancing around them, so as not to kill them. Mexico then jumped on Molly's bed. I had dreamed that I was in Britney Spears' bedroom, which was carpeted and decorated with cheap Sears furniture.

We got dressed up, walked to the deli and got coffees and corn bread cookies, then walked to the bus stop, where we waited in a small patch of sunlight, courtesy of a sole gap between two buildings, illuminating the sidewalk.

We got on the bus and bounced ourselves toward downtown. Molly, Alex and I were sitting on three connecting seats, facing the side of the bus. A man who was sitting directly behind Molly, in a seat facing her, got up and stood in front of me. I noticed that he kept quickly shifting his eyes to look at Molly and then he paused, bent down a little closer to her and said, "You would look better without those glasses." (Molly has wonderful, plastic black framed glasses.) Molly snidely replied, "I wouldn't be able to see without my glasses."

Beat.

Man bends back over, trying to catch Molly's eyes with his, but doesn't and then results to snapping his fingers right in front of her face. Molly looks at him. He says "I hope you weren't offended by that." Molly: "Oh no. But I really don't think you should snap in people's faces to get their attention."

Man didn't say another word, but stood in front of me, baggy crotch at eye-level, for twenty more minutes, all while pseudo-slyly glancing at Molly.

We got to the courthouse and were all told that to empty our pockets and set our bags on the table, a request which immediately grips me with the same anxiety I get everytime my bags go through the secuirity machine at the airport, and I think please god, let there be no traces of drugs from months ago in the bottom of my purse/coat pocket. It takes each of us about three minutes to empty the contents of our coat pockets, mine full of change, probably around three dollars worth. I go through the metal detector and the lady with the badge that says MTA on it asks why I am here. I tell her it's for a hearing and "I want to defend it because I didn't do..." She puts a hand up to hush me and says, "Middle window", pointing ahead, past rows of plastic chairs, to a plexi-glass window, with a line of five people behind it.

Alex and Molly beep when they go through the detector, Molly must spread her arms and legs. Alex didn't have to.

After I fill out some paperwork, I join Molly and Alex and wait. We watch the judges come out and call the defendants back. An older man with white hair who is wearing red suspenders comes out. I really hope that he would be my judge. He wasn't. I got a woman in a lavender, micro-fiber, breezy blouse with brown hair that was curled out, but in a feathered way, not a bobbed way.

We went back to a small room. There was a tape recorder. She sat behind a desk and I sat in another plastic chair, facing her. I naturally sat straight up, instead of my trademark slouch, as I was being put under scrutiny. The room reminded me of my high school probation officer's office in Iowa and the time I was handed an empty cup and told to go pee in it. I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror and whispered, Karen, you can't do this. You are stoned right now. I went back into the p.o.'s room, my mother was also in there, with a still empty cup and told him that I had a bladder infection and couldn't pee. Then I got in the elevator with my mother to leave and when the doors closed she turned to me and said, "Karen, I'm not stupid."

But now, I was older and wiser and not stoned. The women pushed record with a sense of urgency and made me raise my hand. "Do you swear to tell the whole truth?" "I do." She asked me to tell her what happened on the evening of February 8th, 2008. Before I answered my mind wandered back in time to what I was feeling that night. Who I was thinking about, what my overall mood was during that time and I felt depressed for a moment, but I shook those thoughts away and I told her the whole story, *see post below*, but lied a little, saying I wasn't actually pedaling, but my feet were touching the ground, and I using them to sort of "paddle" myself down the platform. She seemed very sympathetic towards me and was nodding understandably in a motherly way. I wanted to hug her. She then said she had no further questions, turned the tape recorder off and told me to wait outside.

I was so smiley when I rejoined Alex and Molly in the waiting room. Twenty minutes later the woman behind the plexi-glass called my name again and I went up there.
"You are still required to pay in full, a fine of $100 to the transit authority of New York."

My heart dropped.

I hated that she had said 'transit authority of New York', why couldn't she have just said MTA?

But, it didn't get me down. No sir. The three of us went to the rustic WaMu bank on Fulton, that is beautifully architectured with amazing chandeliers and marble cylinders and such, then to JoJo's for a late breakfast.

Never again will you see me riding a bike on the subway, but I just may hock a huge luge when no one is looking, just for good measure.

Who says women aren't funny?

Vanity Fair certainly doesn't say it and damn it, neither do I. Tiny Fey is a babe, and I don't say this just because she is extremely attractive, but she is also equally hilarious; it is both of these things together that make her fly off the charts on my babe-o-licious meter, along with Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Amy Sedaris, Amy Poehler, etc, not to mention all the beautifully funny women I am lucky enough to actually know/have met.

A few months ago a boy I knew told me that he thought I was funny while we were waiting for the subway. I didn't say anything back to him, maybe an insincere thanks (I don't do well with compliments). He then added something along the lines of, "...and most girls aren't funny." (Trying to build up the compliment by putting the rest of my gender down.)

Anyone who thinks girls aren't funny must conglomerate around women who don't know left from right (I can imagine them making those little L's with their thumbs and index fingers) because anyone who has got a fraction of intelligence is capable of pulling something funny out of their ass. Granted, it may not be on par with the sheer genius of a Tina joke or a Jerri Blank witticism, but it should at least spawn a smile.

In my experience, most people I know are funny, boy or girl. I simply spend time with people who make me laugh, which I assume isn't a criteria for friends that is unique to me.

So for any guys out there who have the unfortunate opinion that most women are not funny, it's really simple to fix - all you need do is raise your standards.

Crab me a piece of that

Oh - Rockaway Park was a hop skip and a jump to delicious puns and delightful euphemisms.

Alex, Molly and Eric prove to be heartfelt walkers and steadfast thinkers.

If her eyes are that vicious than her lips must be delicious!

Kate Bush!


- I wrote the lyrics of this song with a green Sharpie on the wall of a bathroom at a Brooklyn bar (it's a unisex bathroom), try to find it!