Organization is the Key

I have an official "Shit List." A friend of mine gave it to me, as a method for dealing with what she lovingly (?) refers to as my "rage disorder."
The Shit List is a fill-in-the-blank sort of memo pad, its purpose etched out in massive block letters across the top. The color scheme on this little stationary gem is brown on tan. Cute, right?
Aaaaanyways, the Shit List helps the confused and angry spell out a special little haiku of hatred for any occasion. Anything you might need to know when stoking a good, strong, ridiculous grudge is laid out: "offender," "violation," "severity," "plan of attack," along with the minutiae of where and when someone dared to offend you -- so it will be easier to track them down and punish them. There's even a check-box for pay-back, so that, with all the justice you're handing out, you can remember who you've already gotten and avoid double-dipping with the long arm of righteousness.
This thing is a God-send.
I'm angry at someone pretty much every hour on the hour -- a veritable weather channel update of rage. Before I received this miraculous gift, however, I was not organized with my hating. I'd be doing really well, focusing my death-ray glare on talks-too-loudly-in-public guy, and then, without warning, lady who can't walk in a straight line EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE LINES BUILT INTO THE SIDEWALK would steal all my precious precious anger forces.

Irrational rage is hard to keep up, people! And woe betide the crooked walker (or loud talker, or person taking up too much space on the subway) who would unwittingly (everything they do is unwitting, the jerks) turn my wrath upon him. Back in the good old days of unfocused, under-organized, manic anger, the poor sap would have received the double whammy of me being angry for whatever he was doing, as well as my anger at being distracted before I could show my full disgust at the previous unwitting jerk.

No longer.

Not only does this list allow me to be more efficient in my hating -- producing a single, laser-like beam of incensed-ness with each new entry on the list, it also keeps the fires of my displeasure burning longer.

Before, I would have been angry at the girl wearing a Fashion Institute hoodie (rather akin to wearing a PETA-brand dalmation puppy coat, only much worse-looking) for only the brief moments that we passed on the street. If I had thought hard enough and hadn't been distracted by my commute home (the subway being a traveling gypsy caravan of ire-inducements), I might have been able to let my anger steep for the next hour or so, but eventually, she, like so many others before, would have shuffled from my mind and gone on her ignorant, hoodie-swathed way.

Would have, but with the List, no one is safe.

Hoodie girl is just the first entry. Now, when I feel that horrible cold blankness in my heart that comes after an extended period without the warmth of pure outrage to power me, I need only glance at the little brown notepad siting on my desk: "Offender: Girl on Street [stranger]; Violation: Wearing FIT hoodie; Plan of Attack: angry bafflement," to return focus and meaning to my life.
It's almost enough to make me smile.

An Imagined Affair with the Big Bad Gawker

A friend of mine -- a good, good friend who actually deigns to read this blog -- suggested today that I write something about the incestuous world of New York gossip-mongers. The bloggers, the page-sixers, the...bloggers. In fact, this lovely friend (who reads AND comments! what a guy!) went even further and suggested that I write about one professional gossiper in particular: Nick Denton of Gawker.
The formal submission of the idea:
"Can you make up a blog entry about running into Nick Denton? PLEASE! Since it's Valentine's Day and all, maybe it could be about an imagined affair with the Big Bad Gawker? I KNOW he's gay. but, hey, maybe it could be a purely platonic affair?"
I got very excited when I read this, thinking, "Oh my God, blogging is so awesomely easy! I don't even have to think to do it -- my friends think for me, and i just bang on my keyboard until I manage to beat some funny out of it!"
I gleefully tilted my head to one side, attempting to envision an incredibly satisfying encounter with the BBG himself.
And then I realized -- it's a good thing I don't need brains to blog because I am a moron. I know absolutely nothing about life, and this ignorance extends to the identity of the BBG. I have no idea who this man really is. And by "really is," I don't mean that I cannot sense his essence or imagine the gawker-y goodness of his personal musk. I mean, I don't read Gawker. Never have. Probably will in about five seconds just to see what this man is about, but as of this very moment, I am in a Gawker-free state of innocence.

But innocence is not what my friend wants from me. Innocence is boring. Innocence is lame. Innocence is the opposite of torrid affairs with confirmed homosexuals. And you can't have a good blog without at least one of those (torrid affairs, I mean...or the homosexuals...they're good too).

So I finally dug out my own brain from the back of my closet and started thinking. What would a girl have to do to whip up a believable affair with Le Gawker? I'm not going for the real thing (although I believe there is an opening in my planner for a tempestuous lover on Tuesday and Thursday nights...just saying). I just need enough knowledge of the man to make a satisfying story for my friends.

The easy thing would be to Google him like crazy (which almost sounds dirty -- I'm gonna Google his brains out!) , maybe actually read his little blog or whatever he's twiddling around on these days, pester my friend for more details so I can stop thinking for myself, OR -- OR! -- I could actually meet this fabled Prince of Gossipland.

"How might we encounter each other?" I wondered. Perhaps I will just run into him on the street one day. After all, it's small world, and I walk a lot. Then again, he is in charge of a blog, so perhaps he sits in his mom's basement all day, in which case, I would only have a chance of running into him on "random basement tour Sunday," which I conduct on the third Sunday of each month.

Maybe I could track him down. He is all over the Internets; surely I could reach him through his favorite medium. A banner ad? Posting my contact details and an enticing picture on Gawker's comments pages (because that wouldn't attract any weirdos...)? Writing his name in this post often enough that some search engine picks it up? I don't think search engines actually work like that, but I in trying to engineer some sort of massive shout into the void, all I could come up with was to write Nick Denton! Nick Denton! Nick Denton!

Like I said, I am a damned fool.

Once I found him, what would I do? What would I say? Would we chuckle our way through an awkward first date and then rush home to write snarky things about each other?

God, I hope so.

Maybe as our romance blossomed, we could go on a heartwarming rampage of judging and curmudgeonry together. We could curl up on cold nights, keeping each other warm with the combined powers of hilarity, vitriol and a dash of sexy. Nothing makes you feel more in love than agreeing that everyone else is inferior -- that's a fact, kids.

So Nick Denton (Nick Denton! Nick Denton! Nick Denton!), if you're out there, listen to my friend's Valentine wish, and snark me, baby, snark me.

Bizness Lunch

I went to a luncheon today. For work. Yes, I do manage to hold down a job, though you'd never guess from my behavior at these things. No amount of free food is worth the pure psychological and arm-pitular torture these things put me through. They make me nervous, and, worse, they make me very aware that I cannot be trusted to interact with other people like a normal, professional adult.
Everyone at a business luncheon is supposed to be schmoozing, getting people really stoked about this great new thing their company is doing.
I don’t do this. I never know anybody at "industry events." I barely know what “schmoozing” is -- according to my Word program, I don’t even know how to spell it. I'm 22 years old. I haven’t even been in the work force for a year. I know my parents, people I went to college with and my roommate. I don't even know everyone in my own office.
Luncheons, as translated through my non-business-person mind, are very similar to one of those high-school-misfit-gets-picked-on-then-makes-good-in-the-end movies, only there is no crowning of the homecoming court at luncheons. It’s one of their many flaws.
You (the misfit, of course) show up at a party and none of the cool kids who invited you are there, just weird kids you don't know. The cool kids hang around in the shrubbery long enough to see the complete shock and dejection on your face and then scamper off to their own cool-kid party, where there might be some beer and people will probably get to make out with each other.
In the luncheon situation, my boss, who tells me, “Oh, you should go, what a great opportunity!” but who would never attend such a thing herself, is the cool kid. She definitely looks like she would lurk around in someone’s azaleas for a laugh.
Just like every true nerd party, luncheons do not encourage any false sociability brought on by booze (flaw number 2). They make foolish excuses for such disappointments, like, “You have to go back to work after this, and we don’t want you passing out in front of your boss again,” or, “The cheap tables we have set up cannot support someone dancing on them,” or, “This particular luncheon takes place at 11 in the morning, and, in some circles, drinking at 11 AM on a Wednesday in front of your professional peers is frowned upon.” But, as the slow-blossoming seed of a can-do business lady, I don’t like excuses, I don’t take no for an answer and I DO like a good bloody mary.
When I got to this little shindig, and there was no bar to hang out at, I was at a loss. So I did what any really professional person would do and hid in the bathroom (after walking in on another lady in there and then forgetting to give her my card).
I spent about 10 minutes more pretending to rummage around in my purse for some very important documents and checking my phone for all the very important phone calls I was missing by deigning to be here with these people. Really, I was just standing over my purse in the corner with my head down, waving my hands about every so often, but I thought that if I looked serious enough, I could probably fool people. I furrowed my brow.
When that 10 minutes was up, I still had about 45 to burn. A true innovator, I poured a Coke into a wine glass, hoping for some sort of placebo effect that would make me as charming and witty as I KNOW I certainly must be when I have been drinking. I did my best to chat people up -- which means I stumbled into groups of people who were obviously enjoying pleasant conversations, muttered some words about my job and threw my business cards at them, all while blushing and stuttering and sweating up a storm.
I looked like I was a really bad liar trying to pull something over on them – “No, you caught me, I’m not a journalist at all, I’m just using your strategic business input for my own nefarious schemes. Blast you!”
Thankfully, no one caught on.

Sleeper Crazy

Everyone has at least one intensely crazy friend. They’re good to have around: fun for parties and, an excellent addition to your posse in sticky situations -- like when people want to kick your ass for using words like “posse.”
Sometimes your crazy friend is easy to pinpoint -- that one throwing whiskey glasses at people in the bar? Yeah, that’s probably her (unless, you know, there’s one on the other side of the bar actually setting people on fire, while catching the thrown tumblers in his mouth. Though, if that’s the case, you probably have bigger concerns than figuring out which of your friends is the ‘wacky’ one).
Other times, though, “THE crazy friend” is bit harder to identify. In these cases, it might behoove you to take a deep look inside -- perhaps YOU are crazy friend. If you took that “look inside” in any sort of literal sense, you are definitely the crazy friend. If you have sufficiently scoured each of your personal orifices (orifi? ew.) and found not even the tracest amount of crazy, you may have what we in the industry (yeah, there’s an industry of crazy...just stay with me here -- i haven’t been writing in a while) call, “a sleeper.” The sleeper is someone who appears normal, nay, wholesome, from the outside, but who secretly dreams of someday being a baton-twirling cannoli chef in Vermont (the least wholesome of the 48 contiguous states - if only you knew). The sleeper is dangerous because you never know when the crazy will escape; it might be during a street brawl, when you need it, or it might be when she’s supposed to be performing an emergency tracheotomy on you, in which case you need her head to be in its place.
I met my secretly crazy friend at college. She lived in the all-girls dorm with some of my other friends freshman year, and I thought she was just a cute little Italian city girl.
Wonderful and amazing, yes, but also relatively normal.
Until we went to the secret bar of death.
Back in December, we were out with some friends. We didn’t know everyone there, and it was getting to one of those points in the night where we were all just sort of staring at each other and wondering how lame we would look if we went home early. Finally, one girl took the initiative and said she was heading out. Everyone else -- a group of decidedly UNCRAZY IN ANY WAY friends -- offered to escort her to wherever she was going. We’re not really that nice, but it was on the way to the subway.
We came to a dark street. On the dark street there was a dark door -- all black, no windows, no signs. She knocked, then stood back (a trick that was, I later learned, for the benefit of the hidden security cameras), and a small man in a fedora appeared, looking as though 1939 were just on the other side of that magical portal. Dazed by the turn of events (so THIS girl is crazy friend? why didn’t anyone tell us?), we all trooped in to what was, essentially, a secret speakeasy.
I was dark. It was empty. People smoked -- a sure sign that this place was above (or below) the law. Every wall was plastered with the eeriest of eery mixtures: childish kitsch and cigarette smoke, with maybe a dash of evil thrown in. A moldering Bart Simpson doll leered at me from above the fridge. It was missing an eye, and combined with the beard-like pattern of grime creeping up around its jowls, it looked like a particularly-scurvy-ridden pirate. An equally-bedraggled Raggedy Anne nailed up (nailed! they probably did that to actual children in this place!) next to him played the role of pirate wench. Hula hoops, pressed tin ice cream ads and a corner full of mismatched crutches (for people whose knees got broken in this place?) created a decor that House Beautiful might describe as “retired, feeble-minded, killer chic.” It was like every skeezy flea market in the city had vomited in this place.
I turned to a friend and stage-whispered, “This is how people die!” I was poised to hear the sound of a chainsaw revving up behind one of the mysterious doorways, or to have manacles fly up out of the bar to entangle us. I have seen movies, my friends -- i know how this stuff works.
Photographs of happy young drunks grinned at me from every wall -- the owner, we discovered, had a keen interest in the art of photography. I wondered if it was wise to keep photographic evidence of one’s victims, and then I realized that, if no one ever escaped, it didn’t really matter what they saw.
“We need to leave,” I hissed desperately, trying to look nonchalant when the gaze of the fedora’d proprietor swept in our direction.
“No, this is too weird -- we have to stay,” Giuliana shot back -- sidling up to the bar.
I gave her the bug-eye of fear. She came right back with the bug-eye of excitement -- pure crazy seeping out of her pupils. They had that sheen that you see on over-caffeinated children or American Gladiators with the scent of blood in their nostrils. She would be no help to me tonight.
Two other men passed the security camera test and came in. One was a “bartender,” meaning he was allowed to step behind the bar and toss us Heinekens, Budweisers and Heineken Lights for the reasonable fee of $5 a pop. There was no Bud Light -- the only part of the night that gave Giuliana pause. “Heineken, Heineken Light, Bud...and no Bud Light?” she squeaked, her sense of propriety clearly shaken but the lack of symmetry in the beer selection.
“Nah, but we have vodka tonics.”
“Um...Heineken Light.”
And that was that. Completely at ease, she turned to the other man who had come in and struck up a conversation. He smelled pretty, like gardenias, and jolted by the complete non-threatening-ness of such a thing, we all started talking about his lovely odor.
I imagine it’s what groups of dogs do when they all get together -- stare dumbly around then spend five minutes going, dude, what did you roll in? Although i also imagine that scents like poo and dead animals are of more interest to said group of dogs.
Not to be distracted from my completely rational state of terror, I managed to pull my other friends out of their perfume-induced trance and remind them that our lives were in increasing peril with every minute we spent here -- pretty smells or not. But when we turned to G, she was deep in conversation with eau de gardenias guy, and waved off our offer of escape, safety and continued existence.
We turned to the one who had guided us there -- the pied piper of slow creepy death -- and, from the lap of proprietor she motioned that G would be totally fine.
So, being the good friends we are, we ran. G stayed, apparently not even aware of the possibility that she might be sold into white slavery later that evening, hand squeezing gardenias to make intoxicating perfumes for the wealthy.
I guess the crazy badasses of the world don’t worry about things like that.