Well, that was weird

I know that my lovely, wonderful, caring parents understand me because they are always recommending top-notch films and television dramas for my viewing pleasure. They don't just throw out recommendations willy-nilly - they have an exacting, hi-tech, algorithm-filled vetting process that goes a little something like this:
1) Watch.
2) Become confused.
3) Decide the watched thing is weird.
4) Call me and say, "Have you seen this thing? You'd like it - IT'S WEIRD."
 
I am that person in my family.

If my parents were to recommend something to my sister or their friends or the mailman or the dog, they might say, "You'd like it - it's interesting/jentacular/touching/happy-making." But for me, it's just "weird," the subtext being "[like you! You zany kid with your Brooklyn and your ugly gremlin dog!]"

Nobody does it like I do it

Here's how I wanted to start this entry: "I talk to myself more than anybody I know."

This statement is true - in a way. I really do talk to myself A LOT. In fact, I would say I am keeping a conversation running in my head at least 87% of the time that I am awake. [PS: I almost put "alive" there instead of "awake". DO NOT PANIC. It was just a mistype; I am NOT a vampire. I am always alive...at least 87% of the time.]

It's not all color commentary, either. If you looked into my mind, rarely would you see: "And here comes the orange juice into the glass! Glug glug glug! That will be delicious!" Nor is it some sort of long-running inspirational speech to myself. I do not kid myself into thinking that I am my own personal Coach Taylor.



OMG EVERYONE WATCH THIS SHOW RIGHT NOW!

Ahem...

A night of flabbergastation

A few days ago, I saw a commercial for this stuff: http://tinyurl.com/yj9yypm

Yes, it IS a paint roller for your FACE.

How bad do you have to feel about yourself to get to the point where you're just like, "F it. I'm spackling the heck out of this!" ? Is this what we've come to, ladies? Just because we cannot ever, possibly, in a million bajillion years look as flawless as Miz Beyonce does in the commercial for these things doesn't mean we have to resort to construction-site levels of facial maintenance. She has make-up ARTISTS, after all, and it's obvious that, were one to paint one's face (or newly remodeled kitchen), one would choose an artist over one's untrained self any day.

This commercial came early in the exciting whirlwind that was "Watching the Golden Globes Alone While Eating Frosting." Apparently, I do not watch enough live television because "face spackling apparati" were among the least shocking things I saw that night.

For instance, I was also inordinately confused by the McDonald's commercial wherein a man woos his hot neighbor lady by asking her if she's heard about McDonald's breakfast. First of all, ew. Second of all, are you implying something about my weight, neighbor dude? Second, no, wait, third, a conversation about fast-food breakfast is not going ANYWHERE, no matter what delicious, greasy lies the McD's ad guys are feeding you.

What were you thinking, laundry-room guy? You NEVER just go up to a cute girl and say, "Hey, have you heard about McDonald's breakfast?" Because yes - she lives in America - of course she has heard of McDonald's breakfast! And once she tells you that, where do you go? "Oh, okay, so you know about sausage biscuits?" Yes. "And coffee? They have coffee now!" Yes. I read that in the Times last year - when it was actually new. "Oh, so, you know there's.." Eggs? Hashbrowns? Everything else that's served at fast food breakfast places around this great nation, with the notable exception of Chik-fil-A Chicken Biscuit, which is a genuine loss?!?!?! Yes! Yes, I know what breakfast is you dolt, now stop staring while I fold my underpants.

Thankful this story is not about me

A friend of mine is in the middle of training for his job. It's one of those training dealies where they make you go to a particular branch of the business - always in some godforsaken place where you would never actually go if you weren't being paid to do so - and they put you in a hotel - the only one for miles in said godforsaken place - until you truly learn what it is that you are supposed to be doing for them. Because they have cut you off from everything that could possibly be important to you - your real home, your family, friends and civilization - learning the job only takes about 6 or 7 weeks. So it's a good deal for them.

For my friend, it's slightly less of a good deal. Sure, he's getting some serious training to make him good at his job, and I'm sure his Hampton Inn Junior Executive Suite is very nice, only...he has to share it. He's a 29 year0old man, training for a management-level job, and he has a roommate. In a single.

Fortunately, my friend is a pretty happy dude, so this situation didn't really bother him much, until the day he was chatting with said roommate and his new boss, and they started discussing hobbies. The boss says,"You know, I like reading." Oh, that's nice. What do you like to read, mr. boss man? "You know, just stuff about serial killers."

[ROOMMATE]: "Wow - ME TOO!"

BOSS: "Oh yeah? Remember that time that John Wayne Gacy did such-and-such?"

ROOMMATE: "Classic."

...

And thus is my friend Chris doomed to sleeping with one eye open for the rest of his training period.

Rooming with someone is a lot like dating - if you are a normal human being, you know to hide certain things from the other person until they become more comfortable around you. Your complete knowledge of famed and lesser-known serial killers throughout history is one of those things.

Now, in the interest of Christopher's personal safety we are on a mission to find him something equally as creepy. The hope is that he can drive away the Dahmer-phile before something truly horrific happens.

So far, we've suggested that he start rabidly tearing through the Twilight series - not so much for the horror factor but because I would never trust a 29-year-old gentleman who reads softcore porn that magically hones in on some secret pleasure center in the tiny brains of adolescent girls.

Our other idea was to set him up with an "Adventures of Teletubbies" or some other 12-pager that only the very young or very simple would enjoy. We figure if just sits in a darkened corner, reading it over and over , and occasionally giggling to himself, "Not again, Tinky-winky!" he'll either scare the creepy roommate into submission or earn himself a lifelong weird-o friend.

Would a Darlene by any other name...

It's weird how much a name can mean.

When I was five or six years old, I really wanted my name to be Christina. I thought that was the prettiest, and that having such a name would equate to having a rainbow-colored glittery gown and possibly also being a mermaid. That's just what happens to people named Christina.

Kids with names like Bubba and Jeb have a different path carved out for them than kids who introduce themselves to their montessori school classmates as Zachariah and Llewellyn - who are themselves teased in high school by the Jasons and the Ashlees. Names mean something. It's not fair, and it's not right, but when was the last time you hired a lawyer named Tequila?

The importance of a name was cemented for me in high school. I went to private school in Georgia, which means I was surrounded by rich white people who had lived in the same town for generations. I guess those people eventually run out of inspiration for names, living in the same place for 8 thousand years, because a lot of recycling happens there (and believe me, not a lot of recycling happens in the south) - last names become first names, first names start to look like last names, middle names multiply, and everything is book-ended with numbers and honorifics. I actually went to school with a girl named Forrest (handed down by an extra-kind male relative, certainly), not to mention strapping young men with names like Mulford, Bentley and Johnson (heh).

These names were important to people in the south because they let everyone else know critical information, like who their momma's grand-pappy had been, and what buildings he owned (the name recycling extended to important landmarks, like highways and the local mental health center). Of course this public advertising of blood-lines still didn't stop some people from dating their cousins, but, we were on the Alabama border.

This past weekend, when I was back in the glorious south ruining Steeplechase (see other blog), we happened to tailgate next to a pretty rowdy crew. Four middle-aged women and one gray-haired man of indeterminate age and intelligence (he didn't say much and disappeared halfway through the day) had set up shop and were determined to keep the party going all. day. loooong. The ringleader, who started migrating over to our lot in the early afternoon, spent most of her time crowing such sweet nuggets of knowledge as:

"We're sorry, but we ain't sorry for nothing!"

and

"She didn't steal my third husband - I gave him to her!"

I imagined she had read these on a set of refrigerator magnets or embroidered pillows at some sassy southern gift store, but they suited her. She wasn't really talking to us - just yelling to the crowd at large - but I think she got her message across, especially the part about being "NEWLY DIVORCED" - which seemed more directed at my dad than some of the other comments.

Between the four of them, these wild southern women seemed to have had 27 husbands (though some may have been pass-alongs - do they only count once?), 18 houses and more than a few frozen margaritas. They ended the day by tickling my dad with sunflowers and then hugging it out with him - while my mom quickly ushered us all into the car.

Before my mom could close the car doors (and, believe me, she tried), this ringleader - she of the southern-fried aphorisms and the vodka soaked (but friendly!) embrace - poked her head in to say thanks for the fun time. My mom said, "you're welcome."
[silence. did i mention my mom is the only sober person here?]
Woman: "Are y'all putting up those pictures you took today? On the Facebook? They were soooo fun."
Mom, mentally: "The ones of you rubbing my husband with various flora?"
Mom, out loud, "Oh...I don't really DO Facebook."
[another attempt at driving away, with or without the woman hanging from the door]
Woman: "Oh, yeah, I understand that. Would y'all e-mail them to me?"
Mom: "Um, okay. What's your e-mail?"
Woman: "Well, my name is Darlene and so it's...."

Darlene. God bless you, Darlene, and God bless the south, and God bless my mom for giving me the most boring name on the planet so that mean girls don't write blog posts about me.

Scared

I've always hated "scary" things. Haunted houses, slasher films, ghost stories - all seemed like a horrible way to waste time and lose sleep. For weeks.

At sleepovers, a supposed friend would invariably suggest telling scary stories. "Wouldn't you rather talk about puppies and candy?"

The other girls would laugh, and because, like most 9-year-olds, they were twisted little gremlins, they would choose to discuss gore and shrieks over cuteness and joy. The ghost stories would start, and I would have to find increasingly creative ways to not listen.

"The girl heard another scream coming form beneath the house and - "

"Man! I'm hungry - sorry guys, but does anyone want cookies? No? Oh, you can keep going, don't wait - I'll just be in the kitchen."

I would then play dumb with myself about where the cookies were. (In the garage? No? Weird!) and spend a good 15 minutes architecting a still-life-ready platter of assorted snacks. Bathrooms were also good places to hide out, and I'm sure I got a reputation as the sleepover invitee you need to buy extra toilet paper for.

When I ask other people why on earth I would ever intentionally get scared, they almost always answer, "Because it's fun!" This is a lie. Being unable to go anywhere in the dark for fear of a chainsaw wielding maniac is not fun to me. Suffering crushing paranoia every time I look away from a mirror and look back - with the expectation that a ghouly face will be there - is not fun. Crawling into bed with my parents when I was in HIGH SCHOOL because I actually feared a Signs-like alien invasion? Ask my parents - it was not fun.

I've almost swerved off the road coming back from a showing of Night of the Living Dead because I thought I saw a freaky zombie man standing on the shoulder of the highway. It turned out it was a speed limit sign and that I seriously needed glasses for night driving, but still, not fun.

Being old enough to pay rent and feed a dog does not make me any less terrified of stupid things. Having someone else in my bed every night kind of does, although, considering my boyfriend doesn't wake up when I repeatedly punch him for snoring, I'm not sure how much I trust his reflexes in the case of a zombie attack. So when he suggested last night that we visit "The Field of Terror" - a haunted corn maze and hayride, I was not particularly excited.

"That means we go outside? At night?"

"Yes, and then people scare us!"

"How is this fun again?"

I tried to explain to him that humans are not supposed to be outside at night in the dark. -"That's why early man moved into caves and started building fires," I told him. "To willingly go into the field of terror is just MOCKING EVOLUTION. Why would I do that?"

He laughed, and then he bought me a haunted corn maze token.

I had never been in a haunted corn maze before, but I had serious doubts as to its enjoyability for me. Haunted-ness aside, I don't like mazes. Getting lost, like getting scared, falls squarely in the "not any fun at all" column. If I am going into any kind of labyrinth, David Bowie and some muppets had better be in there, too, otherwise, I see no need for wandering around aimlessly in an enclosed space. That is what they do to lab rats. Do you think lab rats have a fun life?

We entered the corn maze through a giant flaming devil-head. At least, I think that was the effect they were going for. It was definitely giant, and devil-looking. The "flaming" part, though, consisted of two red lights shining through holes in the eyes, and tiki torches placed on either side of the top.

Corn at night is scary, even with no one in it. In fact, it might be even scarier with no one in it. With screaming groups of teenagers everywhere, it kind of loses its edge. I found solace that night in the idea that, if there was a monster attack, the monsters, like lions of the Serengeti, would probably pick off the weak (i.e. the children and the very many TOTALLY HIGH people) first.

Every 20 yards or so, a structure would loom up out of the corn, and we would be forced by creepy clowns or grinning goblins to walk through places like "The Meat Locker" or a bus inhabited by multiple Freddy Kruegers. These people were scary, but probably not in the ways they intended.

Because I hate scary movies, I have never seen any of the Freddy Krueger oeuvre. How can I be scared of someone that I've never seen in action? For all I know, he brings children candy and then frolics off to help the elderly (though I have doubts). The other creepy-crawlies - the clowns and the chainsaw men - I also don't understand. My dad uses a chainsaw. He's weird, but he's not super-terrifying. And clowns are stupid. I worked with a clown once, at a summer camp. He was frequently too sad to come into work - which was eerily ironic, but not scary.

The scary part was that there were enough people in this middle-of-nowhere town in New Jersey who were willing to be Freddy Kruegers and scary clowns in a corn field every night for a month. It's not hard work, but I'm sure it's must be mentally taxing - the constant screaming, the darkness, the smart-alecks who harass you in your own place of business. And the strobe lights, oh, the strobe lights.

I don't know when strobe lights became the official lighting of scariness, but a good 50% of the buildings we were forced through were lit up like a zombie rave. In fact, one of them was a zombie rave - instead of trying to scare us they simply waved us through a flashing hallway where a number of their black robed buddies were jumping up and down to a weird techno beat.

Where do these people come from? And why do they do what they do? I imagine the actors are all a) really into Halloween; b) really into scaring people; or c) super-excited drama geeks. I have seen all three types of person in action, and yes, they are much scarier than clowns or skeletons or corpsey-looking-whatever-they-ares (It looked like the costume department had gotten kind of picked over by the end. Plaid shirts are not the height of fashion, it's true, but they do not particularly give me the willies.). I fear them because they do not understand that fear is bad, that humans should not enjoy seeing blood and hanging out in the dark, unprotected from the elements. Also, I hate fun.

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.